As excited as we are to see the UFC take it\u2019s show to the White House lawn, there was one question that had come to mind as Dana White discussed the exploding cost of the event: how much of this are taxpayers going to be paying for?<\/p>\n
The UFC may not have pioneered the art of getting local governments to pay for events, but they sure have perfected it. These days, the promotion rarely rolls out the cage in any state or country that isn\u2019t quietly<\/a> or not-so-quietly<\/a> paying a six to eight figure site fee to draw them there. So would TKO be looking to suck a massive site fee out of the U.S. government to throw UFC White House?<\/p>\n \u201dNo, we\u2019re eating the whole thing,\u201d White told Sports Business Journal.<\/a> \u201cSo yeah, it\u2019s going to be a historic one-of-one fight, and just like I talked about with the Sphere, we\u2019re going to make the Sphere look like f–king ash tray money.\u201d<\/p>\n UFC 306 at The Sphere was the most expensive event the UFC has ever held, costing over $20 million. That\u2019s ten times the normal cost of production for the promotion. Some of that pricetag had to do with generating massive visuals<\/a> for The Sphere\u2019s screens, and some had to do with creating a new type of lighting rig that wouldn\u2019t block out those screens.<\/p>\n In the case of UFC White House, Dana says they\u2019re once again creating a unique lighting rig to maximize the wow factor of the location.<\/p>\n \u201cJust the whole setup, the lighting grid,\u201d he said when asked why it would be so expensive. \u201cI don\u2019t want a traditional lighting grid, I don\u2019t want to see screens, I don\u2019t want to see lights. The only thing I want to see is the White House in the backdrop and the Washington Monument on the other side.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s also tons of other factors to consider, like having to spend nearly a million dollars to replace the lawn<\/a> after they\u2019re done. And according to White, all that is coming directly out of the UFC\u2019s pockets, not the pockets of John Q. Taxpayer. Maybe that\u2019s why they\u2019re jamming so many damn ads<\/a> into the events now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As excited as we are to see the UFC take it\u2019s show to the White House lawn, there…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":436511,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,638,82,98879,702],"class_list":["post-436510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-fighting","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc-white-house-2026","tag-ufc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=436510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436510\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/436511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=436510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=436510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=436510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}