But the UFC is more than just a sports sensation that lures fight fans and uninitiated looky-loos toward pricey pay-per-view events promising violence and excitement. The league is a cultural phenomenon. It’s turned fighters into celebrities; it’s created new expectations for what fighting looks like in movies and media; and it’s even intersected with national politics.
In fact, how UFC got this big says a lot about America today — and where American politics could be headed next.
How the UFC got so huge
The UFC hasn’t always been a behemoth. In its earliest days, it was unpolished; one of the company’s taglines was “there are no rules.”
Its no-rules violence led Sen. John McCain to call the UFC “human cockfighting.” The lifelong boxing fan wrote letters to governors in every state asking them to ban the organization’s events saying, “I’ve seen people repeatedly getting smashed in the face with a guy sitting on top of them. That’s not sport!”
“That really sent [the UFC] to a pretty terrible place. It got kicked off of Pay-Per-View. A lot of states didn't even want anything to do with it, they would shut down [fights] at the last minute,” Luke Thomas, a combat sports analyst for CBS Sports, told the Today, Explained podcast. “And in January 2001, the guys who originally founded the UFC, they threw in the towel. They sold it for $2 million to Dana White, [and] Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta.”UFC’s new owners struggled too. Then Donald Trump called, White said on a podcast, and said, “Come to my place. We’ll have you here at the Taj Mahal.”
Trump’s invite helped the UFC’s new owners in the short term, but it was really when they seized upon a new trend — America’s love of reality television in the early 2000s — and created the reality TV series The Ultimate Fighter on Spike TV that the league’s fortunes turned around.“For the casual audience who had maybe heard of UFC this put a brand new face on it,” says Thomas. “The world got to see really unique people doing a really crazy thing at the height of the reality TV show boom. And it worked!”
And the success of the first season led to more seasons. It led to deals with ESPN. The UFC was eventually valued as a billion-dollar sports organization. And it’s only improved its value and stature in culture since.
But it’s not just Dana White showing love for the former president. Former title contender Colby Covington has built a whole persona around being a Trump fan. He wears MAGA hats all the time; in post-fight interviews, he makes shoutouts to first responders, members of the military, and to Trump himself; and throws around phrases like “fake news” regularly.
Jorge Masvidal, a Cuban American fighter from Florida, held a series of pro-Trump rallies called Fighters Against Socialism. “We either re-elect President Trump and keep America great,” Masvidal said at one rally. “Or we let Joe Biden destroy the greatest country the world has ever seen.”
Despite the rising popularity of the UFC, and its owner’s and fighters’ embrace of conservative politics, Eagan says, “I do not think that the UFC will sway the election [for Trump].”
But he does believe that Trump’s embrace of UFC and combat sports has created a sort of blueprint for appealing to young men who “may be vaguely conservative but are generally sort of apolitical.”
According to the sports data site IMG Arena 75 percent of UFC’s fans are men and 88 percent of those men are between the ages of 18 and 44.
A demographic any candidate would be happy to tap into.