Dana White, TKO Group partner with Turki Alalshikh to form boxing promotion: What it could mean for the sport

After years of speculation, Dana White has entered the boxing game. White is set to be a part of the executive leadership of a new boxing promotion that is a partnership between Turki Alalshikh, Sela and TKO Group Holdings, Inc., the three parties announced on Wednesday.

TKO is the company that owns both UFC and WWE. White serves as the UFC president and CEO. He will be joined on the boxing executive leadership team by WWE president and TKO board member Nick Khan. According to the press release, “TKO will serve as managing partner, providing day-to-day operational expertise, management, and oversight of the promotion.”

White has spent much of his time in the spotlight professing his love of the sport while also trashing the way the sport has been run in recent decades. Throughout that time, White has also repeatedly claimed he was looking to get into the boxing space before backing off, saying the financial structuring of boxing doesn’t make sense.

“This is a strategic opportunity to reimagine the sport of boxing globally,” Mark Shapiro, TKO president and COO said. “TKO has the deep expertise, promotional prowess, and longstanding relationships. Turki Alalshikh and Sela share our passion and vision for evolving the current model. Together, we can bring the sweet science back to its rightful place in the forefront of the global sports ecosystem.”

Alalshikh’s entry into the boxing world has helped deliver some massive cards with long-awaited bouts, including Tyson Fury vs. Oleksandr Usyk and Artur Beterbiev vs. Dmitry Bivol.

Sela is a Saudi Arabian entertainment conglomerate that has been involved with Riyadh Season and Alalshikh’s cards.

Wednesday’s press release used three bullet points to outline features of the new promotion while also stating that more news would follow, including fighter signings:

• A highly structured system to develop new talent from around the world, including athlete combines and academies.
• Access for all boxers to the UFC Performance Institute, the world’s leading combat sports performance training, research, rehabilitation, and nutrition center, featuring locations in Las Vegas, Mexico City, and Shanghai.
• TKO’s production, media, and promotional expertise, to deliver both in-arena experiences and top-tier, state-of-the-art broadcasts to fans around the world.

In an interview, White expanded on the model he intended to implement, suggesting the same model as used by the UFC.

“You know the format and everybody knows the format,” White said. “The best fight the best and work their way up the rankings. Once somebody breaks into the top five, there’s no question who the five best guys are in the weight class and they fight it out. Once somebody holds that belt, you don’t need three letters in front of the belt. Whoever holds the belt is the best in that weight class. It’s a very simple model.”

TKO CEO Ari Emanuel has been hinting that the move was coming for weeks. One particularly ominous Emanuel quote came from an appearance on the Pat McAfee show where he suggested that the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act would need to go away to make their entrance into the sport easier.

“We’re starting to talk about boxing,” Emanuel said. “We’re kind of looking at that right now. I think you’ve got the Ali Act that hurt it. Hopefully, who knows what’s going to happen with the Ali Act. And then Dana has a plan for boxing. We’ll see.”

The Ali Act was enacted in 2000 and sought “to protect the rights and welfare of professional boxers on an interstate basis by preventing certain exploitive, oppressive, and unethical business practices.”

For many years, the UFC has been accused of anticompetitive practices in the MMA space, eventually landing in court across multiple cases that were eventually settled prior to trial. The implication that TKO would like to get into the boxing space but without the landmark congressional act that protected fighters was the sounding of a warning bell to many, especially as President Donald Trump — who has close ties to many in TKO, including White — returned to the presidency.

Emanuel further dove into TKO’s plans to enter boxing in an investor call in late February.

“When you look at boxing, it checks the boxes of all of that. It’s thoughtful. It’s the right strategic place for us to be. We have experts in Nick Khan and Dana White, among others, that can drive that business. We can be selective in terms of how we participate and whatever we do we will not take risk and it will definitely be value accretive. I would tell you that there’s still strong interest in the sport around the globe, in particularly the US.

“… We are close on an agreement with the Saudis on the creation of a boxing league, where we TKO would be the producer, the promoter, and responsible for all day-to-day operations of the venture whereby we would receive a fee of $10 million-plus.

“… So, we’ve just sent a delegation to London to meet with the Saudi delegation led by Andrew Schleimer our CFO and Nick Khan who runs WWE and Lawrence Epstein who runs UFC and they had a full-day meeting earlier this week and we’re getting awfully close and when we have something official, we’ll come out. But I think I’ve given you a framework of what the deal will be, it’s own league and we’ll have consistent fights throughout the year.”

It’s unclear what the “consistent fights throughout the year” would be. Almost every high-value boxer has existing promotional deals with promotions such as Matchroom Boxing, Top Rank, Premier Boxing Champions and others.

Whether TKO would be launching a “prospect league,” as has been discussed in the past, or simply serving as the primary promoter for the events Alalshikh has put together with other promoters is still to be seen.

White appeared on the Pat McAfee Show hours after Wednesday’s announcement to expand on the philosophy of the new promotion, suggesting fighters without protected records and less downtime during event broadcasts. He did not, however, specify the level of fighter they are looking at for these events.

“People want to see great fights at the end of the day,” White said. “Boxing has become this thing where you have to be undefeated for people to care about you. That’s all going to go away. There’s a lot of guys out there that are going to be on this roster that have a lot of zeros on their record, and they’re all going to fight each other. What people want to see are great fights and they want to know who is the best in the world.

“… We’re going to make the live events great again, too; we’re going to clean that up. The run of show will run faster. It’s not going to take nine hours to see four fights. These guys put on a fight and then have a podcast and put on another fight and have a podcast. The show is going to run like the UFC does with fight after fight after fight.”