2026-06-10 15:30:52
Dana White’s Zuffa Boxing hopes to take the sport to a new level.
The 56-year-old businessman – who is best known for running the UFC – moved into the boxing world in earnest in 2025, and White is unapologetically ambitious in the sport, having recently staged his first show in the UK.
Speaking to Sky Sports after a show in Bournemouth, White explained: “I’ve been saying to everybody, January 1st – judge us then on the work that we did this year. We’ve got a lot of big announcements coming up over the next month, so you can expect lots of big things coming from us.
“That’s what I want to do with the sport, not just a couple of shows. Great matchmaking, put on fight cards like tonight [Bournemouth] – that’s the goal.
“What starts to happen is as we rip the sport apart and start to build from the ground up with nights like tonight, it starts to create all these different storylines and starts to line up different fights. The fans and the media start to talk about what they want to see next.
“We have a Sky deal, which is a very big deal to us, so we’ll be in the UK a lot. We’re five months into this thing and we’re already adding more shows on our Paramount deal and I hope the same thing happens with Sky.”
White ultimately wants Zuffa, and the sport of boxing more generally, to compete with the NFL and the NBA for attention.
The UFC boss – who has developed a high-profile feud with fellow promoter Eddie Hearn in recent months – said: “Without sounding too arrogant, people always ask me about ‘oh, you’re competing with this guy’. At the level that we’re at, we’re competing with the NFL, we’re competing with the NBA, we’re competing with Major League Baseball and with the NHL.
“In the United States, the powerhouse over there is the NFL.
“When you go outside the United States, you start competing with soccer. When I think about my competition, those are the people that I’m looking at as competition these days.”
Visit Bang Premier (main website)
