The UFC announced the White House fight card.

Topuria vs. Gaethje headlines. Pereira chasing a third belt. Six fights on the South Lawn on June 14th — Trump's 80th birthday. $60 million budget. 85,000 people expected on screens at the Ellipse.

No Jon Jones. No Conor McGregor, yet.

The internet decided the UFC underdelivered. I think they missed the point entirely.

What actually happened in those negotiations

When the $60 million budget leaked, every big name in the sport started doing math. Jones came out of retirement. McGregor started campaigning. Managers started making calls.

They all thought this card was different. That the occasion was so big the UFC would bend its own rules.

It wasn't. And they didn't.

This is where it gets interesting — not as a fight story, but as a business story.

Because what those fighters and their teams ran into is something I've watched happen over and over in this sport. And it's something that costs promoters, fighters, and investors millions of dollars every year when they don't understand it.

The organization that never flinches

The UFC has one mode: their terms or no terms.

That's not arrogance. That's the thing that got them here. A company sold for $4 billion, now worth multiples of that inside TKO, built over 30 years by never making exceptions — because exceptions become precedents, and precedents become problems.

Every fighter who has ever tried to strong-arm the UFC has learned this. The organization doesn't move. It waits.

And here's what that means if you're building anything in this sport:

The leverage you think you have and the leverage you actually have are almost never the same thing. The UFC's power isn't just in their contracts. It's in the fact that they've never needed any one person badly enough to break their own rules. That's a position that takes decades to build — and most promotions never get there because they make exceptions early and can never walk them back.

When I was running leagues, this was one of the hardest things to hold the line on. The pressure to make exceptions — for a big name, for a broadcaster, for a sponsor who wanted something that didn't fit — is constant. The promotions that stay consistent are the ones that compound. The ones that bend early are the ones that spend the next three years renegotiating everything.

The mistake the fighters made

The fighters who held out didn't make a negotiating error. They made a framing error.

They looked at $60 million and saw a payday. They should have looked at it like artists look at the Super Bowl halftime show.

Everyone knows the halftime show pays almost nothing. Beyoncé, Bruno Mars, Usher — the NFL check is not the point. 150 million people watching is the point. The sponsorships that follow are the point. The cultural moment that compounds for years is the point.

Ilia Topuria understood this. He's already secured a Richard Mille deal. You think that happened in a vacuum? Headlining the White House lawn changes what a fighter is worth to sponsors, to brands, to the media cycle — permanently. In a way no single payday ever could.

This is the calculation that promoters and managers consistently get wrong. They optimize for the transaction. The smart ones optimize for the position.

The move nobody saw coming

Here's where the story gets really interesting.

While the UFC was busy not negotiating with Jones and McGregor, Jake Paul's Most Valuable Promotions was doing something completely different. They didn't call the UFC. They didn't ask for permission. They went to Netflix, built their own card, and announced it for May 16 — a month before the White House event.

The headliner is Ronda Rousey vs. Gina Carano. Ngannou. Nate Diaz vs. Mike Perry. A legitimate card at the Intuit Dome in LA, live globally on Netflix.

And here's the detail that matters most: Rousey said publicly that the UFC turned down her comeback. MVP got her because the UFC passed. The UFC's own Hall of Famer is now headlining a rival card on the world's biggest streaming platform — and she's out there telling anyone who will listen that the UFC is "one of the worst places to make a living."

Netflix/MVP is also paying fighters differently — writing huge checks for the big names. Directly attacking the one thing fighters have complained about for years.

Now let me be clear about what this card actually is from a business perspective. Almost every name on it is a free agent for a reason — retired, released, or past their prime in the UFC ecosystem. MVP didn't build Rousey, Ngannou, or Diaz. The UFC did. This is a brilliant one-off built on assets someone else developed.

That's not a sustainable business model. You cannot build a 30-year enterprise on borrowed names.

But — and this is the part worth paying attention to — MVP found the one move that power can't easily defend against. They didn't try to negotiate with the UFC. They didn't try to compete directly. They went around them entirely, took the fighters the UFC had already moved on from, put them on Netflix a month before the biggest UFC event ever staged, and made the whole conversation more complicated.

The UFC thought they were only managing negotiations with fighters. They weren't watching the other door.

That's a genuinely smart play. Whether it builds into something real or fades after two events — that's a separate question. But the move itself? Worth studying.

What this means if you're building

Whether you're a promoter, an investor, or an advisor in this space — the White House card and everything around it is a masterclass in a few things that never change:

1. Consistency is the most underrated form of leverage. The UFC never had to threaten anyone. They just never moved.
2. The biggest value in any deal is rarely in the deal itself. It's in what the deal unlocks next.
3. One-off spectacles aren't businesses. The UFC runs a show every weekend. That's the difference between a highlight reel and an organism.
4. Power doesn't negotiate. It creates conditions where the other side negotiates with themselves.
5. The most dangerous competitor isn't the one asking for a seat at your table. It's the one building a different table entirely.

The fighters who held out are still great fighters. Some of them will get another shot. But they left the most valuable card on the table — not money, positioning — because they mistook the occasion for ordinary leverage.

That's a mistake worth understanding before you find yourself in a similar room.

Best, Adam

P.S. If you're building in the combat sports space and want to think through the business side — reach out or apply at SKOVAX.CO​

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