UFC president and CEO Dana White’s long-planned foray into boxing appears imminent.
“There will be some big announcements soon,” White said during a press conference in Ireland on Thursday while promoting Callum Walsh’s fight against Przemyslaw Runowski.
“And let me tell you, if you know anything about me, and you go back and look at anything I ever said, I never say anything that I don’t do,” White said.
“We’ve been kicking the whole boxing thing around for a long time, but you’ve never heard me commit and say, ‘I’m in.’
“I’m in.”
The MMA executive and lifelong boxing enthusiast White has teased his entry into the sweet science for several years, attempting to fix what he has billed as boxing’s broken model. But it has never gotten off the ground.
In August 2019, White said Zuffa Boxing would be up and running by October. In 2020, he teased boxing fights that he said would be announced soon. In March 2023, White alluded to a boxing division that would launch within a 12- to 24-month window.
Amid the false starts, Zuffa Boxing has since been re-branded as TKO Boxing after the UFC and WWE merged under the Endeavor-backed TKO umbrella last year.
In recent years, White’s involvement in boxing has been mainly highlighted by promoting Walsh, an undefeated junior middleweight, alongside the Irish contender’s primary promoter, Tom Loeffler of 360 Promotions.
This week, White is even promoting Riyadh Season’s debut show in London featuring Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois on his social media channels, similar to how he promotes his UFC shows.
Earlier this month, in an interview with BoxingScene, White praised combat sports power broker Turki Alalshikh, chairman of the General Entertainment Authority in Saudi Arabia, as someone who reinvests in boxing while everyone else just takes.
Manouk Akopyan is a sports journalist, writer and broadcast reporter whose work has appeared on ESPN, Fox Sports, USA Today, The Guardian, Newsweek, Men’s Health, NFL.com, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Ring Magazine and more. He has been writing for BoxingScene since 2018. Akopyan is a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America and the MMA Journalists Association. He can be reached on X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube, through email at manouk[dot]akopyan[at]gmail.com or via www.ManoukAkopyan.com.