With nearly every major North American professional sports league already inked to media rights agreements for the next several years, perhaps the most desirable live sports inventory left on the market is the UFC.
The MMA promotion helmed by CEO Dana White has a media rights deal with Disney that dates back to 2019 and expires at the end of 2025. That deal is worth a reported $300 million annually and includes rights to all UFC content, including its pay-per-view events. However, recent reports indicate that a number of media companies are interested in acquiring UFC rights once they become available in 2026.
In an interview with Mark Shapiro, the COO of TKO Group (the Endeavor-backed outfit that combined UFC and WWE last year), CNBC’s Alex Sherman pressed the executive about the UFC’s media rights outlook. And despite Disney having an exclusive negotiating window with the UFC as part of its current agreement, Shapiro wasn’t shy about discussing other potential suitors.
“[Endeavor CEO] Ari [Emanuel] and I will have a pretty big first quarter as we go around the merry-go-round if you will, to talk to different players that are interested, potentially splitting the packages,” Shapiro said. “We’ve got linear, we’ve got digital, we’ve got pay-per-view. I mean, there’s a lot of options here, we’re going to explore all of them. But let’s be clear, we have an exclusive window… with Disney/ESPN on UFC, and we intend to honor that.”
And while the Disney deal has proven largely successful for both parties, Shapiro may just be paying lip service to the idea of an exclusive negotiating window. Disney could very well retain some of the UFC in a new deal, but it’s seeming likely they won’t keep it all.
It’s a sentiment that White echoed prior to UFC 306 at The Sphere in Las Vegas.
“It’s going to be interesting how this plays out. We could end up being like the NFL and other sports where we could be on multiple platforms, or just one — I don’t know how that’s going to play out. But we’re in those talks now and to be honest, a lot of those potential media people will be at The Sphere this weekend,” the UFC CEO told Bloomberg in September.
One of the companies that continues to come up with regard to UFC media rights is Netflix. The streaming giant recently signed a media rights deal with WWE for its Raw property, which will make its Netflix debut in January 2025. Of course with UFC and WWE now under the same corporate umbrella, it’s easy to imagine that relationship with Netflix expanding.
“I think absolutely they’ll be at the table on UFC,” Shapiro said of Netflix. “I mean, they get the UFC, they’re fans of the UFC, they’ve been to the UFC, their kids watch the UFC. And they’re looking for those leagues, those brands, those kind of power sports content factories that can go global. And UFC is very much a global brand.”
Netflix is far from the only media company rumored to have interest in UFC. This past summer, Warner Bros. Discovery — amid its very public loss of NBA rights — emerged as a potential suitor. And as always, you can’t count out the other big digital players like Amazon and Apple, who have shown increasing interest in live sports programming in recent years.
As a league indisputably on the rise, the UFC’s media rights are coming to term at an enviable time for TKO. They’ll have interest from both the traditional media companies trying to strengthen their portfolios to stay relevant in a new media landscape, as well as interest from the big tech companies looking to break into live sports in a big way.
Surely, the demand for UFC rights this time around will result in a substantial increase from the $300 million per year the promotion currently earns in rights fees.
[CNBC]
