Dana White is a heat magnet and it seems no matter what he does he always gets slammed for something. He boasted a while back that the UFC was on the way to its best year yet and the critics have come out to take potshots at him. White wasn’t phased and fired back in this ESPN interview even referencing the sale of the UFC to WME-IMG in 2016.

If you don’t know what’s going on in our business, how can you speculate we’re having a bad year? This is our best year by a long shot. I think the sale has everything to do with it. Everybody is looking at that $4 billion sale and asking, ‘Did they deliver?’ F— yeah, we delivered. We deliver every single year. And still, every year, if you listen to the media, we’re f—ed.

Dana continued on with more references to WME and how things have changed somewhat out of necessity and about his expensive pet project add on to their headquarters.

WME-IMG Endeavor bought us for $4 billion, and obviously they need to hit certain numbers for the banks. Right now, I’m spending another $1 million on another wing I want. That’s how bad of a year we’re having. Ari Emanuel wants to buy the building next door and build more s—. We’re still growing.”

 

He also went off on those who fault him for allowing UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor fight boxing GOAT Floyd Mayweather Jr outside of the UFC.

Who cares if it was a boxing match? Do you think we knew Floyd Mayweather was going to fight Conor McGregor in 2017? F— no. We still had our year lined out, a budget and everything else. This is the fight business. You have no f—ing idea what’s going to happen. If that fight hadn’t happened, Conor would have fought twice in the UFC and who knows who he would have fought or the fights it would have set up. This s— doesn’t just happen. We create this s—.

Finally, White also talked about the imminent Conor McGregor return

It’s looking good to get him back.

You can check out the full ESPN interview by clicking this link.

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