Dana White has spent six months running a boxing promotion and his verdict on the sport he entered is blunt: it is far more broken than he anticipated.
Appearing on ESPN’s First Take on Friday alongside newly signed Zuffa Boxing fighter Conor Benn, White delivered a pointed critique of how traditional boxing promoters operate, arguing the industry is structurally designed to extract money rather than build lasting careers or a sustainable product.
“This sport is way more broken than I even thought it was,” White said. “Now that I’m involved, how rinky dink the sport really is.”
His central complaint was volume, or the lack of it. White argued that boxing promoters run their rosters like distressed assets, staging infrequent events and disappearing between them rather than developing fighters into genuine stars.
“Every time you watch a boxing match, it’s like a going out of business sale. They’re trying to grab up as much money as they can and then they run away and hide for two years, then they pop up again and put on another fight,” White said. “I’ve already done more fights this year, my first year, than all the promoters combined.”
He also pushed back on the industry tendency to blame fighters for being uncommercial, flipping responsibility onto the promoters themselves.
“If you’re not putting on fights, how the hell are you making money? It doesn’t make any sense. I heard some of the other promoters when I started to sign some of the guys, they were like, ‘We could never make any money with him anyway.’ Well, that’s not his job. That’s your job. My job is to figure out how to pay him and pay me. His job is to be a badass,” White said.
White also stated his five-year goal publicly for the first time, framing it as a return to boxing’s cultural peak when world champions were household names and major fights drew global audiences.
“When your father was fighting, everybody all over the world knew who the champion was. When big fights happened anywhere in the world, everybody watched. Boxing was big in America back then. That is my goal: to make it that way again over the next five years,” White said, gesturing to Benn, the son of British boxing legend Nigel Benn.
Stephen A. Smith, who has long criticized boxing’s promotional structure on the same platform, backed White’s diagnosis on air. “The promoters have ruined it, not the fighters. And now we’ve got somebody that’s gonna make sure we’re getting the fights we want to see,” Smith said.
