It has now been just over a year since the UFC and WWE were merged under the TKO umbrella in what was a ground-breaking partnership.
In September 2023, it was announced that Endeavor Group Holdings, UFC, and WWE would be formed into a new publically traded company, called TKO Group Holdings.
With that, the UFC and WWE were merged under one umbrella which led to excitement through the fanbase that there would be more crossover between the two organizations.
Dana White reviews the UFC’s partnership with WWE
Although there hasn’t been much crossover inside the ring and the Octagon, several UFC stars have attended live WWE events and have even been brought into the ring.
The latest to do so was interim heavyweight champion, Tom Aspinall when the WWE touched down in the Co-op Arena in Manchester.
When the merger was made public, UFC CEO Dana White admitted that he was skeptical about it and stated that the UFC and WWE would remain as two separate products.
Despite that, the WWE recently held their NXT Battleground 2024 event inside the UFC Apex, marking the first time the UFC Apex has hosted a WWE event.
“Yeah, since we kicked off the whole TKO thing, it’s been great. The synergies are basically between I’d say more, the sponsorship and production, how we figured out with both companies to streamline some of the expenses we had when we were separate,” White began to explain in an interview with Sports Business Journal.
“You can see the stock in the last three days has gone up like, 10 or $11, so it’s on fire right now, it’s been a great experience. I wasn’t very excited about going into a public company, it doesn’t seem very fun to me, but it’s been alright. I do what I do, they do what they do over in the WWE.
“We have a good working relationship between us and the WWE, which we did not have before TKO,” White continued.
Dana White talks UFC broadcast negotiations as he drops major hint
The UFC is coming to the end of its current broadcast deal with ESPN at the end of 2025, meaning negotiations for a new deal have already begun to take place.
In January 2025, WWE’s Monday Night Raw will start a new groundbreaking partnership with streaming giant, Netflix, with the product streaming exclusively on the platform going forward.
White has admitted that although it is unlikely that the UFC will land on a platform like Netflix, we could see a situation in which separate UFC products are broadcast on different networks.
“I think as we go into our negotiations in 2025, this thing could play out a lot of different ways, obviously we could be with Disney and ESPN for however many (more) years or you could see all of our content get chopped up like WWE and NFL does, and different products going to different networks.
“I don’t know how that’s gonna play out as we get closer to getting into these negotiations but it is a possibility (that we end up on Netflix),” White stated.