The UFC has negotiated certain “almost offers” which have never completely done, and it turns out that the former owner in disgrace, Vince McMahon, was at the center of one of the largest.
In 2011, the UFC worked on a new dissemination rights agreement after exceeding its previous house in Spike TV and there were more than a few interested parties. In the end, the CEO of the UFC, Dana White, said that it was NBC who came to the table with the best offer, and the two parties laughed just a few last details before signing a contract.
“So I’m on the line of 1 yards, we are about to conclude an agreement with NBC,” said White on Stephanie McMahon What is your story podcast. “One of my big points in the case was that The ultimate fighter was to be on the United States (network). We are literally in New York for days by hammering with all the leaders there. Finally, they come back and say: “We will do it, we will say The ultimate fighter on the United States. ‘
“So the next day, we come back, and we are about to sign the agreement and do all of this, and they are like” we cannot believe this, we did not know that, we have just discovered – Vince McMahon has the right to determine if another combat sport can come to the United States. “What am I like?
At the time, WWE was one of the biggest programs broadcast on the American network with its flagship series Monday evening RAW. McMahon exercised a total control over the promotion, but it turns out that he in fact had the power of Nix any other combat sport by appearing on the same network.
This forced White and the former owner of the UFC, Lorenzo Fertitta, to fly to WWE offices to meet McMahon in the hope of concluding an agreement so that the promotion could ink the agreement with NBC.
“So, Lorenzo and I said that we will go to Connecticut, and we will meet Vince, and we will see if we can do it,” said White. “We fly, we go to the offices, we enter (Vince) and we sit down, we tell him, we tell him the story and he is like” yeah, I don’t want you on the network “. We are like why? (He said) “I don’t want you.”
“So that exploded the whole NBC agreement. We were actually going to buy G4. We buy G4 and all these other crazy people (stuff). So we won the phone and we call Eric Shanks and we take it to the and we do the Fox agreement. The rest is history.”
G4 was a network devoted mainly to video games with series such as Attack of the Show where future stars like Olivia Munn made its debut.
Once McMahon has been the agreement, the UFC obviously did not end up buying G4, never ended up working with NBC and rather landed at Fox for the next seven years.
If there was a silver lining to this whole situation, White says he thinks that the purchase of G4 would have been one of the worst ideas in the history of the UFC.
“Life is crazy in this way,” said White. “You don’t know what we would have done or how it would have played, but we think that if we buy G4, it would have killed us.”
Barely three years after the UFC was forced to pass the purchase of G4, the network ceased the operations and went bankrupt with NBC closed it.
The UFC agreement with Fox worked for both parties before the start of the combat sport giant in 2018 to sign a new seven -year agreement with ESPN which was worth around $ 300 million per year. The UFC is now back in negotiations on a new dissemination rights agreement with the organization looking for around 1 billion dollars per year for the new contract.
Regarding McMahon by choosing to land the agreement with NBC, White thinks that it was only its nature and he decided that the UFC was going to be a rival rather than an ally.
“I think that (Vince McMahon) had this thing where he had to create this (rivalry),” said White. “It was his thing
Quite funny, McMahon then praised the UFC, and the new owners of Endeavor, when WWE sold to the company led by Ari Emanuel, which merged the two organizations into a power conglomerate now known as TKO Group Holdings. McMahon finally resigned from his post in TKO after an explosive trial was filed against him by a former employee alleging sexual abuse and trafficking among other offenses.
