Rumors are swirling that the owners of the UFC are preparing to sell their successful investment for a massive profit, and many are wondering where that would leave minority owner Dana White.
For starters, it would leave White with a massive payday. He owns roughly 10 percent of the UFC and the numbers being thrown around for a potential sale are in the $3-4 billion range. But would White remain the president of the UFC if brothers Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta decide to move on?
“I don’t know. I don’t know how that would all work out, but I’ll tell you this — the day we decide to sell, I probably don’t want to do this anymore,” White told “The Dan Patrick Show” Wednesday, as transcribed by Luke Thomas of MMAFighting.com. “I love this. I love this business. I love the sport. I jump out of bed everyday excited to go to work.
“And listen, me and Fertitta brothers have been together a long time. We’re very close friends. We work well together. Something we did would be a mutual decision and we’d probably all be looking to get out.”
White has already publicly denied several times that the UFC’s owners are working on a sale.
“As far as the UFC being for sale, I’ve said this a million times, we get offers on the UFC all the time,” he said. “It started in 2010. We got our first offer for the company, which was over $1 billion and we turned it down.
“We’re not up for sale. We’re always working on deals and our expansion globally. I’ve been saying since this thing came out, no, we’re not for sale, but let me tell you what. If somebody shows up with $4 billion, we can talk. We can definitely talk.”
Since the figures that ESPN’s Darren Rovell reported on Tuesday were in the $4 billion range, that may have been White’s way of leaving the door open for him to flip-flop down the road.
The most interesting theory we have heard thus far is that the Fertitta brothers are interested in purchasing a stake in a certain NFL franchise. White denied that too, though we know denials can’t be taken at face value when the stakes are this high.
