Dana White was more than ready on Thursday to respond to a few statements made by PFL co-founder Donn Davis during a town hall session held on MMA Fighting just 24 hours earlier.
During the hour long question and answer period, Davis addressed numerous inquiries from fans including the success of the recent PFL: Battle of the Giants pay-per-view capped off by Francis Ngannou’s return to MMA where he bludgeoned Renan Ferreira with punches for a first-round finish in the main event. While Davis couldn’t reveal how many pay-per-view buys the card generated, he did make one dubious claim when comparing PFL to UFC.
“This event by our research beat every viewership number of every UFC event this year and was very, very close to Ring of Fire,” Davis said.
It’s safe to say, White isn’t buying it.
When asked to address that claim following a Power Slap event in Abu Dhabi, the UFC CEO gleefully pulled out a sheet of paper filled with metrics comparing PFL to his slap-fighting league rather than the UFC.
“The PFL should keep the UFC out of their mouth,” White said. “They can’t even deal with Power Slap. Power Slap destroys PFL. It’s weird that you asked me that question because I just happened to have some papers here.
“So first of all let’s start with followers — Power Slap has 19.2 million followers, PFL has 10 [million]. Video views, PFL fight week did 326 million. Power Slap 8 did 690 million. PFL fight week Instagram views: 76 million. So if you look at PFL, fight week and the aftermath, these guys had 76 [million]. Just the week of [the event] they had 68 million on Power Slap and we hadn’t even had a fight yet. PFL’s Instagram reel with Francis and Ronaldo did 14 million views. Power Slap 9’s Instagram reel with contender Isaih [Quinones] had 22 million views. That was a repost of an old fight. The repost of the old fight beat Francis and Ronaldo.”
While he didn’t spend much time pitting the UFC against PFL, White did toss out one claim that a UFC Fight Night card held back in January actually pulled in bigger viewership numbers than the PFL pay-per-view.
“I could keep going on for a f*cking month here,” White said. “Then if you want to get into what he said about the UFC, I have a laundry list here but let me just start with this: UFC Vegas 84 at the APEX beat them.
“I love the stuff that he said. He sounds like Kamala [Harris], talks a lot but says nothing. I would hate to be one of that guy’s investors. [He said] ‘I don’t watch MMA. I’ve worked seven years and haven’t taken a vacation.’ You should probably take a vacation. You’re out of your f*cking mind. You should probably take a vacation.”
White rarely misses an opportunity to dunk on anybody attempting to come after him or the UFC but he reveled in the opportunity to fire back at Davis following his statements on Wednesday.
“That guy shouldn’t even mention the UFC,” White said. “He’s not even in Power Slap’s [league]. Then he was talking about ‘there’s all kinds of combination packages and how all this works.’ He doesn’t beat Power Slap in revenue. He doesn’t beat Power Slap in ticket sales. He doesn’t beat Power Slap in sponsorship. He doesn’t beat Power Slap in anything let alone the UFC.
“It’s obvious this guy isn’t an MMA fan. He’s acting like he’s some f*cking great businessman. He does not sound like a guy that I would want to invest my money with. But good luck to his investors.”
White also addressed the recent statement made by current Bellator champion Usman Nurmagomedov, who said that he planned to eventually join the UFC roster after his friend and teammate Islam Makhachev was done with fighting.
That didn’t come as a surprise to White, who expects Nurmagomedov and every other major fighter in the PFL would prefer competing in the UFC minus one person in particular.
“I mean all their good people want to be over here anyway so I would imagine that eventually yes, they will be here,” White said. “Nobody wants to fight in the f*cking PFL except for Francis.”
