How Dana White Aims To Take Over Boxing
DANA WHITE LOVES BOXING.
Yep. It’s true. The hard-charging UFC boss, who’s spent the last 25 years transforming MMA from a fringe pastime into a multi-billion-dollar global juggernaut, is a boxing fanatic. It’s run through his veins since his teenage days in Boston. He boxed in the amateurs. He trained fighters, managed fighters. Bled for the sport literally and figuratively. “I grew up on USA Tuesday Night Fights,” he says, referring to the weekly boxing series in the mid-1980s. “I never missed it.” To those who’ve known White from his Beantown days it wasn’t a shock when, in January 2026, White formally launched Zuffa Boxing, a boxing promotional company. The real surprise? He wasn’t tipping his toes into the sport: White was diving head-first into the deep end.
The details of White’s vision sent shock waves throughout boxing. He didn’t simply intend to become the premier promoter or stage the biggest bouts: he was going to revolutionize the sport. “I’m gonna rip it apart and rebuild it from ground up,” he explains. “I want to build a real business.” Rebuilding the sport, according to White, meant getting rid of the greedy sanctioning bodies, reducing the dizzying number of weight classes, investing in the sport’s infrastructure and athlete development, and creating a “middle class,” in which boxers fight more often. “For a very longtime boxing’s been the haves and have-nots,” says White. “And the haves are a very small group.”
A revolution of this scale would require formidable partners, and White found them. The first? Sela, the sports and entertainment behemoth owned by the nearly trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. Next? Paramount+, who agreed to an exclusive streaming deal for all Zuffa fights in the U.S., Canada and Latin America. Operations would be run by TKO Group Holdings (the sports and entertainment company that boasts the UFC, WWE, and PBR) and overseen by White, WWE President Nick Khan, and Turki Alalshikh, Chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority. Per a roadmap, they’d simply follow the same blueprint that White had used with the UFC. “When I started with the UFC in 2001 they said you’ll never beat boxing,” he says. “Not only did we beat boxing, now we’re going to take over boxing.”
DANA WHITE LOVES A GOOD FIGHT.
This is a fact. He’ll tell you this himself. Not a bare-knuckle, back-alley brawl or donning gloves and stepping into a ring. Those days are long gone. “I’m gonna be 57 this summer,” he laughs. “Unlike all these 60-year-old guys fighting on TV, it’s the exact opposite of what I want to do.” No, the fights he loves these days are in the boardroom, the business world, the public sphere. People telling him he “can’t” do this or “shouldn’t” do that. Following the launch of Zuffa Boxing, he’s found himself in the fight of his life with, well, almost everyone in boxing. This fight—which has gotten very heated and very personal of late—illustrates the sport’s profound dysfunction.
No one denies boxing needs fixing. Desperately. The four sanctioning bodies—WBA, WBC, IBF, WBO—have complicated the sport (increasing the number of weight classes from 8 to 17), charge fighters exorbitant fees, and have been rife with corruption and rankings manipulation. Promoters, consumed by ego, greed and power, have consistently refused to work with one another, therefore denying fans the chance to see the best fighters face off against each other. And neither the sanctioning bodies nor the promoters have reinvested any significant money into boxing. “Nobody had a vision for the sport or gave a shit,” says White. “They all just wanted to rip as much money out as possible. Fuck the fans, fuck the networks.”
Fallout from this dysfunction has been grave. Boxing ratings have plummeted, HBO and Showtime—legacy boxing networks—dropped the sport entirely and American boxing superstars, essential to attract mainstream audiences, were becoming extinct. “I don’t think anyone gives a fuck about the sport unless they believe Jake Paul is boxing,” says former HBO exec and promoter Lou DiBella. “The collapse of the sport over the past 20 years opened the door for Dana.”
But if White has “come through the door” with a vision to make significant changes to the sport, changes that the boxing world has been clamoring for, why does he have such a fight on his hands? To sanctioning bodies and promoters, Zuffa Boxing poses a threat to their livelihood. The UFC model is defined as a “closed league,” one in which the league honchos determine the rankings, weight-classes, matchups, schedules, fighter purses and provide their own championship belts. If applied to boxing, the UFC could mean the end of the sanctioning bodies and the significant marginalization of the sport’s major promoters including Bob Arum (Top Rank), Eddie Hearn (Matchroom), Frank Warren (Queensberry), and Oscar de la Hoya (Golden Boy).
Per boxing writers and pundits, their community might be a small one, but it’s a highly proprietary. Boxing might be a f’ed up sport, but it’s their f’ed up sport and outsiders—particularly deep-pocketed outsiders trying to shake up the establishment—are met with suspicion and skepticism. Some critics have targeted Zuffa Boxing’s involvement with the “evil Saudi empire” and its lobbying for The Muhammad Ali American Revival Act (a bi-patrician bill that would facilitate the UFC’s closed league model). Even diehard fans, who have bitched non-stop about boxing’s endemic dysfunction, are taking Zuffa Boxing to task. Zuffa’s roster of 100+ fighters lacks any real superstars. Zuffa’s fights been mediocre. Zuffa’s on-air talent cartoonishly hypes their crappy product.
Yet the hate may be less about the boxing business than about Dana White himself. Why? Because he’s an asshole. But an asshole in the best sort of way, like Joe Rogan or the late Anthony Bourdain. A self-assured, smart, and exceptionally successful public figure who’s an honest, straight-shooting, “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” sort of guy. A guy who, in this world of spin, hyperbole and, well, bullshit, is devoid of bullshit. And this rare combination makes a hell of a lot of people uncomfortable. The irony? It might require just this sort of asshole to finally save the sport of boxing.
DANA WHITE LOVES PROVING PEOPLE WRONG.
Love might be an understatement. He thrives on proving people wrong, lives for it. Would you expect anything less from a guy raised by a single mom who bounced from Connecticut to Ware, Massachusetts to Las Vegas and then back to Boston all before he was old enough to drink? Of course White’s still got a chip on his shoulder, got something to prove. “We’re gonna be announcing a shit ton of signings this year,” says White, sounding as enthusiastic as a teenager back in Beantown. “By the end of the ear we’ll have a very strong roster. We’re gonna need more TV dates and more venues. Not just in the U.S. but around the world.”
Despite his enthusiasm, White will be facing more than just a war of words with the boxing world. “What Dana is doing has motivated people to come together,” says Kevin Rooney, Head of Fighter Development at Matchroom Boxing, the U.K.’s premiere promotional company. “They’re saying, ‘We’re all in this together and we need to do things that make more sense for the sport.’” Resistance to Zuffa’s plans took shape in early 2026 when ‘motivated people’ including Matchroom Boxing, Golden Boy Promotions, Queensberry, and Top Rank all signed new multi-year deals with global sports-streaming platform DAZN.
Owned by Len Blavatnik, a Russian-born billionaire oligarch, DAZN has been the largest investor in boxing over the past decade. Although lacking any real U.S. footprint, the British-based DAZN recently announced a partnership with Warner Bros. Discovery-owned network TNT, where they’ll air a monthly boxing series entitled The Fight. “They’ve fired up their engines,” Rooney says of the spate of recent deals. “We feel like we’re part of the global home for the sport.”
To outsiders, the fact that boxing’s major promoters have all signed with the same well-funded, global platform might seem ominous. That White and Zuffa Boxing has a fight on their hands they might not win. But industry cognoscenti note it’s too little, too late. “Promoters couldn’t get their act together for a century. Now? It’s stupid to think they’re going to get their shit together,” says DiBella. “Zuffa is following the blueprint of the UFC and to fuck that up would require abject stupidity. They’re not going to do that. I respect Dana as a promoter, respect their abilities and they will be the dominant promotional entity.”
White doesn’t seem worried either. “I’m having a blast,” he says. “I love building things, especially when people are doubters. The only hard part? There’s only so much time in the day.”