Vince McMahon rejected the opportunity to buy UFC a long time ago. Today, the UFC is one of the most successful sports organizations in the world, but in the early 2000s, it could hardly be considered so. The company was bleeding cash; it was not famous, it wasn’t liked by a lot of people, and most importantly, no television networks wanted anything to do with it.
The UFC’s original owners at that time were Semaphore Entertainment Group (SEG); at that time they were having a hard time selling the UFC. Somehow they managed to reach out to Shane McMahon, the son of Vince McMahon, the founder of WWE, and asked if he was interested in acquiring the UFC.
Reply of Shane McMahon
Back in the hard days of UFC, it was suffering from a lot of serious financial problems. So the UFC decided to sell it to some big giants in the industry who can push it financially and can make the company successful with the support of different teams.
Shane McMahon said this in the new Netflix documentary series Mr. McMahon. “At the time, the UFC got into some financial problems and came to us and said ‘Would you like to purchase the UFC?”. I go this is cool.” McMahon said this to his father at that time. “I said ‘Dad, let’s just go for this one. We could grow that brand because it’s tailor-made for what we do. We have a production team, we have a live events team, we had a merchandising team, and we have all of it just ready to go. So to me, it was plug and play.”
Reaction of Vince McMahon
The former CEO of WWE Vince McMahon had earlier rejected the option of buying the UFC at an extremely low price in the early 2000s. McMahon felt it was dangerous for his favorite way of running the business. A few years later, Dana White made the UFC one of the greatest fighting organizations in the world.
Vince McMahon said this in the interview: “When it was presented in terms of buying UFC, I didn’t like that business model. Because in our business model, you can create characters much like Disney or someone else and we can use them forever. As opposed to a boxer/UFC fighter, once you’re beaten, once you’re hurt or something, your career’s over. We’re in show business. That’s a sport.”
UFC began way back in 1993, and now it has gone through many giants, such as Conor McGregor, Max Holloway, and Khabib Nurmagomedov. But not everything was a success for UFC. By early 2000, the UFC was facing huge financial problems trying to compete with boxing and wrestling.
Final Thoughts
Although WWE and UFC have a lot in common, such as athletes and stars having similar influence on the fans, the difference still stands out. WWE is scripted entertainment compared to the UFC, which is an actual fight organization. This fact was good enough for Vince McMahon to pass the decision not to buy the UFC and continue focusing on running the WWE.
Now that decision somehow was very beneficial to McMahon as he focused more on WWE, and many big stars, like the greatest of all time Roman Reigns, had millions and millions of followers across different platforms. What do you think about the decision taken by Vince McMahon? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section.
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