Things were not so smooth for UFC CEO Dana White, the fighters, and even the fans for UFC 304 which recently went down in Manchester, England. The card, headlined by Leon Edwards who was defending his welterweight title against Belal Muhammad faced a lot of issues, especially because of the timing of the event. And hindrances with the broadcast production and with the UFC team under a lot of pressure, apparently things went sideways!

That is not all because even the fighters were not in their full form due to the timings. The event started at 3 A.M. local time which is the prime time when people have already gone to sleep. UFC decided to keep this timing by the pay-per-view on normal American times and that caused a disaster. Among many fighters, Arnold Allen had a problem with his sleep schedule which almost cost him his life.

Arnold Allen faces sleep problems before UFC 304

The 3 A.M. timings caused a huge problem not only for the fans but also for the fighters who were going to be in the event. Leon Edwards had a back injury weeks before the fight during his camp but he still decided to continue. Unfortunately, he lost this bout and Muhammad won. On the other hand, Arnold Allen is also another fighter who opened up about his problems with the timing. His situation was so dire that he was almost going to get into an accident.

According to Haymakers on Instagram, he said, “After my last sparring I was driving home half asleep & I spun my car out & crashed into a barrier.” The late start to the event also made all the interview timings shift and become haywire. Because of this, the fighters had to stay awake and give interviews before the fight which caused a huge problem when it came to the sleeping cycle. ‘Almighty’ was also also a victim of the same.

During the official interview with UFC, he said, “I have to sleep in until about one and there was some bloke next door lawn mowing, so then I had to get extra time to sleep because he woke me up.” Not only was it a hurdle to get used to the new sleeping schedule before the fight but now after the fight with Giga Chikadze, he has to get back to his normal sleeping cycle which is going to be a huge task. On top of that, there was a bigger disaster for the UFC boss because the broadcasting of the fight was also glitching and fans were furious.

What were the problems with the UFC 304 broadcast?

Dana White had previously given an interview about how the promotion was talking with HBO to put the fights on their platform. However, White revealed that “HBO came in and started going, ‘Yeah, we’re going to have to turn this music down, this is going to have to’ — and I said, ‘No, no. You guys are not running our production and telling us what to do.’”

However, the deal was already signed and the money was paid so the boss had to call Lorenzo Fertitta and ask him to get the promotion to break the deal. Ultimately even Ari Emanuel also stepped in to complete the process. However even after removing the deal because HBO wanted to mute the commentators, the fans still could not hear the broadcast properly!

According to Luke Thomas, there was a huge audio outage that made the broadcast face a lot of problems. Already the fans were awake beyond the sleeping hours and on top of that they were not able to hear a single comment because of the glitch. This made them furious. UFC has faced these problems before in the UK, especially with UFC 300 where the fans could not hear the broadcast.

On top of that, there was a shocking noise in the broadcast that resembled the siren tone from The Purge. Even if fans know Brian Ortega’s use of this song they were sure that this time it was a broadcasting glitch. These glitches got a lot of reactions from fighters and fans alike. Curtis Blaydes also chimed in about the timing and said, “You wouldn’t have McGregor fight at 4 a.m. regardless of where it is in the world.” UFC fighter Adrian Yanez also questioned ESPN on their production quality.

This incident raised a lot of questions about the broadcasting quality and timings. Even though Dana White might address these issues, it does not seem like the fans will let it slide if it happens for the third time.