Dana White
Screenshot
UFC President Dana White predicted the viewership for his White House event will rival the Super Bowl’s. The claim doesn’t appear to have any basis in reality.
The comments came during a recent interview with TNT. While talking about UFC Freedom 250 — the widely-discussed fight night that will take place on the White House lawn — White said:
For UFC fans all over the world, this is a very unique experience for everybody; and, you know, we’re expecting Super Bowl-type numbers for this fight.
That accomplishment is virtually impossible for a number of reasons.
Last year, the relatively-underwhelming Super Bowl between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots had an average viewership of 125.6 million. Although that figure wasn’t enough to set a new bar for the NFL, the game did have set a new all-time media record when its peak viewership hit 137.8 million.
For comparison, the UFC’s most-watched event had a peak viewership of 8.8 million on Fox in 2011. On the pay-per-view front, the UFC’s highest mark was set in 2019. Thanks to a main event that featured heated rivals Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov, the event earned 2.4 million PPV buys.
In fairness to the UFC, the promotion has become much more popular since then. Additionally, the PPV era came to an end when the UFC inked a deal to bring its fights to the streaming platform Paramount+ at no additional cost to subscribers. It can be argued that the UFC is more accessible than ever.
Even with those factors working in White’s favor, Super Bowl viewership remains a distant fantasy.
Let’s use Netflix’s recent ventures into live sports as a reference point. The abysmal Jake Paul–Mike Tyson fight, for example, had an average viewership of 108 million. After seeing that figure, one might think the UFC could actually have a historic night.
There’s one massive problem with that, however. The most recent update on Netflix’s total subscriber count had the figure around 325 million. Last month, Paramount revealed to shareholders that the total subscriber count for Paramount+ was a hair under 80 million. Netflix, the undisputed streaming king with four times the subscriber base as Paramount, still fell nearly 20 million viewers short of the Super Bowl.
Barring an unprecedented level of growth in the next few days, UFC Freedom 250 will not come even remotely close to being as popular as the NFL’s big game.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
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