UFC

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The world’s leading MMA organization — fight highlights, knockouts, and the story of combat sports’ global empire.

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About UFC

The Ultimate Fighting Championship is combat sports’ global empire — the promotion that rose from a banned, no-holds-barred spectacle into a multi-billion-dollar mainstream juggernaut, and the most unlikely success story in sports history.

It began on November 12, 1993, in Denver, Colorado, with a gloriously simple question: which fighting style actually works? Conceived by advertising executive Art Davie and Brazilian jiu-jitsu scion Rorion Gracie, UFC 1 was an eight-man, single-night tournament with no weight classes, no time limits, and almost no rules — a boxer, a sumo wrestler, a kickboxer, a karateka, and a skinny Brazilian in a gi. The skinny Brazilian, Royce Gracie, submitted all three of his opponents and changed martial arts forever. The Gracie family’s ground-fighting system was suddenly the most proven combat art on earth, and a new sport — mixed martial arts — had been born on pay-per-view.

Then came the dark ages. Senator John McCain branded the UFC “human cockfighting,” thirty-six states banned it, and cable pay-per-view providers dropped it. By the late 1990s the company was banned, broke, and nearly dead — a VHS curiosity with no television home and a reputation as the thing decent people didn’t watch.

The rescue is the stuff of sports-business legend. In January 2001, Las Vegas casino executives Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta bought the UFC for $2 million and installed their friend Dana White as president. Under their Zuffa banner, MMA was rebuilt from the ground up: unified rules, weight classes, gloves, rounds, drug testing — a real sport with real sanctioning. The Hail Mary was The Ultimate Fighter, a 2005 reality show on Spike TV whose live finale — Forrest Griffin vs. Stephan Bonnar, two unknowns beating each other senseless for three rounds — drew millions of viewers and is widely credited with saving the company. The UFC had its television home and its first mainstream stars.

What followed was a decade of empire-building. The UFC bought its great Japanese rival Pride in 2007 and absorbed the WEC and Strikeforce, consolidating the world’s best fighters under one roof. Anderson Silva’s sixteen-fight win streak and middleweight reign made him the sport’s most sublime technician; Georges St-Pierre became its most complete champion and biggest pay-per-view draw; Jon Jones arrived as the most gifted fighter the sport had ever seen. A landmark television deal with FOX in 2011 put the Octagon on network TV.

Ronda Rousey changed everything next. White had once insisted women would never fight in the UFC; Rousey’s armbar-fueled dominance in Strikeforce made that position untenable, and UFC 157 in 2013 — Rousey vs. Liz Carmouche, the first women’s fight in UFC history — launched a division that would produce some of the sport’s biggest stars. Rousey became a mainstream celebrity, hosting Saturday Night Live and headlining pay-per-views that did blockbuster numbers.

And then there was Conor McGregor — the Irish featherweight with the sharpest mouth and sharper left hand in the game. His thirteen-second knockout of José Aldo at UFC 194 remains the fastest title-fight finish in UFC history; at UFC 205 at Madison Square Garden, he knocked out Eddie Alvarez to become the first fighter to hold two UFC titles simultaneously. The 2017 boxing match with Floyd Mayweather, which McGregor lost but which made him generationally wealthy, proved a UFC star could be the biggest name in all of combat sports.

The business kept pace with the spectacle. In 2016, the talent agency WME-IMG — now Endeavor — bought the UFC for $4.025 billion, then the largest sale in sports history. A $1.5 billion ESPN deal in 2018 made the network the UFC’s American home; the UFC Fight Pass streaming service, launched in 2013, became the sport’s deep archive; and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the UFC famously kept fighting on “Fight Island” in Abu Dhabi and in its purpose-built Apex facility in Las Vegas while every other major sport sat idle.

The latest chapter is the biggest yet. On September 12, 2023, the UFC merged with WWE under TKO Group Holdings in a deal valuing the combined company at $21.4 billion, with Ari Emanuel as CEO and Dana White as the UFC’s president and CEO. Today the UFC stages more than forty live events a year, broadcasts to over 1.1 billion television households across more than 165 countries and territories in over forty languages, and generates well over a billion dollars in annual revenue.

The UFC’s official channel is one of the great engines of that growth: free fights, knockout compilations, the Embedded behind-the-scenes series, and instant highlights from every card — a discovery machine that turns casual scrollers into lifelong fight fans. It is, fittingly, how most of the world now meets the sport: not on pay-per-view, but in the endless scroll, one viral knockout at a time.

The UFC matters because it shouldn’t exist. Every expert in the 1990s said it would die — too violent for TV, too niche for sponsors, too chaotic to regulate. Instead it became the fastest-growing sport on earth and rewrote the economics of combat sports. From a Denver tournament with no weight classes to a $21 billion empire: that is the most unlikely success story sports has ever told.