Eddie Hearn thinks Dana White has taken his eye off the biggest fight business on the planet, and he said so on the Ariel Helwani Show. The Matchroom Boxing promoter, who now competes with White directly in boxing, argued that White’s attention to Zuffa Boxing has left the UFC exposed. As first reported by Bloody Elbow, Hearn called the threat serious.
“I can’t actually believe, I mean, can you believe the depths they are going to for Zuffa Boxing?” Hearn asked Helwani.
He framed it as a math problem. The UFC is the one with the revenue and the profit, Hearn said, and yet White seems to have shrugged at it and turned toward boxing. Then he described the image that apparently bothers him most: “Dana White is going to all of these UFC events and he’s all Zuffa branded up, it’s like, what happened to the UFC?”
Hearn didn’t stop at optics. “That product is under threat right now, big threat,” he said, pointing to a thin crop of stars and to rivals he believes are lining up. He also took a shot at what he sees as complacency inside the company, describing a mindset of “It’s the UFC, we’ll be fine,” before conceding “and maybe it will be.”
How we got here
Zuffa Boxing is White’s newest project. It launched earlier this year with an inaugural card at the Meta Apex in Las Vegas, the same room that hosts so many UFC Fight Nights. According to Bloody Elbow, 14 events have run since, a few of them in the United Kingdom, which puts White on Hearn’s home turf.
The 57-year-old’s grip on the UFC side has visibly loosened over the past year. Bloody Elbow reported that White has skipped several UFC press conferences, which the outlet framed as an attempt to dodge tough questions about the state of the promotion. When he has stepped in front of a microphone, it hasn’t always gone well. He recently mixed up the fighters in the UFC 332 main event while trying to defend that card against criticism.
Inside the company, Chief Executive Hunter Campbell is now widely seen as the one running the operation day to day. White, for his part, has insisted he will never retire.
The competition Hearn alluded to has a name. Earlier this year MVP MMA merged with the PFL, creating a single promotion led by Jake Paul and Nakisa Bidarian. The pair are hoping to repeat in MMA what they have built in boxing, and a distracted UFC is exactly the kind of opening they’d want.
My take
Consider the source. Hearn has every reason to want White’s boxing venture painted as a vanity project draining the real business, and needling a rival promoter on a big show is part of his job. But the specific points he’s leaning on came from White himself. The skipped press conferences happened, and so did the UFC 332 mix-up. A boss who can’t name his own main event while defending it hands the other side free material. The UFC still has the deepest roster and the biggest machine in the sport, and one merged rival doesn’t change that overnight. What would change it is a few years of the man whose face is the brand showing up in the wrong company’s merch.
