UFC president Dana White and WWE president Nick Khan say the new boxing venture from parent company TKO Group Holdings is designed to fundamentally rebuild boxing “from the ground up.”
Speaking to Front Office Sports shortly after Wednesday morning’s unveiling of the new boxing promotion formed with the aid of Saudi Arabia–based entities, White and Khan intend to reinvigorate a sport that has lost significant luster over the past generation.
“You have to break the sport down and build it from the ground up,” says White, who will lead the boxing effort along with TKO colleague Khan. “Everybody involved here realizes that you can’t keep going on the same model that boxing has been on.”
Though rumors have swirled for years regarding White, UFC, and boxing, the still-unnamed initiative creates a direct competition with other boxing promoters such as Top Rank that have long been an object of White’s scorn.
White, however, insists he will operate with “blinders on” as he and Khan develop their own circuit. Similarly to how UFC and WWE operate, individual boxers will be contracted to compete exclusively within the TKO circuit, and a key element again will be to create a much more active and regular cadence of competition than what has been common in boxing in recent years.
“Before, the best fighters continued to fight the best fighters, and then boxing went full into the one-night, going-out-of-business-sale model,” Khan says. “Boxing has been great maybe once every five years. The greatness of UFC is that it’s great at least once every four weeks. We’re at the starting line, but that’s what we’re aspiring to.”
White and Khan confirmed a comment last week from TKO president and COO Mark Shapiro that TKO itself will not supply any start-up cash to the boxing venture. Rather, they said their primary initiation contribution will be “sweat equity” as they build out the business plan and initial operations.
A key early step in that will be to strike a media-rights deal, and the range of possibilities is wide open between linear networks, streamers, and even perhaps non-traditional outlets that don’t otherwise carry sports.
Market Reaction
Investors were enthused with the boxing news, sending TKO shares up by nearly 4% in Wednesday trading, closing at $152.30 per share. While recent months have been something of a roller-coaster ride for the shares given broader economic turbulence, TKO stock is still up by more than half since hitting the market in September 2023.
“I don’t care about any of that stuff. I don’t watch that stuff,” White says. “I just get in there and do what we do. As long as you do what you do and you do it well, all that shit will take care of itself.”
Trump Ties
White has been closely tied to U.S. President Donald Trump. It’s not expected, though, that Trump or any senior political leaders will be involved in this boxing venture, like they currently are for the LIV Golf–PGA Tour negotiations that also involve Saudi entities. The new boxing circuit, however, is seen as a tool for national pride, like it was in the sport’s prior heyday.
“They’re fans,” White says of the Trump Administration. “Whenever our fighters win and they go back to their home countries, they usually meet with the president or whoever the ruler is. All over the world, people are interested in who the toughest person in the world is.”
