As Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley’s Show Gets Into a Controversy, Dana White Wants No Part of NBA’s Drama With TNT

The NBA’s deal with ESPN and TNT Sports will end after the 2024-25 season. Now, Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley tried their best, and they even offered $2.5 billion for the media rights of the NBA. But things don’t seem to be going well for them. Names like Amazon and NBC want to snatch the broadcasting rights and this has been the talk of the town for a while. In fact, UFC’s Dana White couldn’t help but comment on it.

Will the UFC also go down the same road considering the fact that sooner or later the promotion has to decide on media rights as well? Dana White, in his latest conversation with the media at the UFC 302 presser, was asked the same question, with NBA’s example. And the UFC supremo made it clear that his promotion believes that it’s better to do such dealings behind closed doors.

“I do not think it will be a public conversation. No, I don’t ever really talk about money publicly or any of that stuff,” said Dana White during the press conference, as shared by UFC on YouTube. ESPN currently has the media rights of the promotion and it has been holding it for quite some time now. White has been providing bangers one after another and this might prove to be a boon or a bane for ESPN, as the new broadcasting deal is coming up for them as well.

It’ll be interesting to see what the UFC does. After all, their deal will run through 2025 and so the discussions are set to begin much earlier.

The UFC may or may not have a new broadcasting partner…

ESPN and UFC partnership has been pretty lucrative for both of the parties. ESPN currently holds the rights to every UFC content, including pay-per-view broadcasts. They signed a seven-year deal with the promotion back in 2018 at $1.5 billion and well, and it won’t be long before the deal expires. ESPN+ has been growing tremendously since they got the UFC rights. But what about the future?

Now that the UFC is a part of TKO Group Holdings- led by CEO Ari Emanuel- the dealing might have a little problem. TKO president Mark Shapiro, in a conversation with Morgan Stanley Tech, Media and Telecom conference, emphasized that they have multiple bidders for the media rights. “It is our preference to stay at Disney, because of this history. But we’ve had impromptu three different platforms inquire about that window that you’re talking about and when we might be able to sit down with them to discuss moving to a different platform, which we will do if we can’t get the right deal. But the window opens in January.” 

Well, the wind seems to be blowing in the UFC’s direction right now and there’s a high possibility that ESPN will be the one to get the broadcasting rights, but the amount this time might be much higher than $1.5 billion. At least, that’s what Eric Handler, an analyst at Roth MKM, suggested earlier this year. “A UFC TV deal could be announced by year-end with new contract terms upwards of two times the current value,” he stated.

Let’s not forget that the UFC has been getting a lot of revenue. In just nine months (ending on Sept. 30), the promotion’s revenue reached $1,009.4 billion. This was much higher than the $868.4 million from the same time span in 2022. But where does a major part of this revenue come from?

You guessed it right! It comes from media rights. In fact, ESPN paid UFC $702.5 million through September 2023. So the MMA promotion will soon make a pretty important decision.