Combat sports analyst Luke Thomas says 2026 is shaping up to be the biggest year in UFC history, at least if you measure it by headline numbers.
In More Perfect Union’s investigation, Thomas points to the UFC coming off $1.4 billion in revenue, landing a seven-year, $7.7 billion Paramount deal, and attaching itself to a made-for-TV political spectacle with title fights planned around a White House event on President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday.
On paper, that sounds like dominance.
But Thomas argues that the boom looks very different depending on where you sit. If you are Dana White, Ari Emanuel, a major investor, or a political ally, the machine is humming. If you are a regular fan trying to buy a ticket, or a fighter trying to make a living under an exclusive contract, the picture gets much darker.
That is the tension at the heart of his report. UFC keeps getting bigger, but bigger for whom?
A Company Printing Money While Fans Pay More
Thomas opens with the contradiction that is hardest to miss.
The UFC is richer than ever, but fans do not necessarily feel like they are getting more for what they pay. In fact, he says many feel they are getting less.
He points to soaring ticket prices, including social media complaints from fans stunned by upper-deck seats costing hundreds of dollars. In the report, Thomas says ticket prices to UFC events have risen by 4,000 percent over the last two decades.
Of course, some of that can be explained by popularity. UFC is far bigger now than it was in the rougher, more niche days of the early 2000s.
But Thomas argues there is another reason prices can keep rising without much resistance: there is no real rival league strong enough to force the company to compete in the way consumers usually expect. The UFC, he says, has spent 25 years squashing or absorbing serious alternatives in MMA.
That leaves fans with fewer choices and less leverage.
Dana White, in one clip Thomas includes, brushes off concerns about pricing fans out, saying the company is not even close and noting that records keep being broken. That may be true from a business standpoint, but it also reveals the mindset. If people keep paying, the pressure to ease up simply is not there.
And that is the part many fans clearly resent. The UFC can talk about growth, but for the average person, growth often just means another event they cannot realistically afford to attend.
The Fighter Dream Comes With Fine Print
Luke Thomas then shifts to the people who actually step into the cage.
He says getting to the UFC is still seen as the pinnacle for MMA fighters, the place they dream about while grinding in small promotions and local gyms. But reaching that level, according to the former fighters Thomas interviewed, often means walking into a system designed to strip away most of their leverage.
One of the central voices in the report is former fighter Kajan Johnson, who says getting onto The Ultimate Fighter and then landing a UFC contract initially felt like salvation. He thought he was finally going to stop being broke.
Then he read the fine print, or more accurately, started living under it.
Thomas explains that UFC contracts are exclusive, which is a huge break from earlier eras of MMA. Johnson says fighters once moved more freely between organizations, even fighting in PRIDE and UFC at the same time. Under the current model, that kind of freedom is gone.
Instead, a fighter can be tied up for three years, sometimes longer, even if they are inactive.
That matters because in most sports, if an athlete has talent, they can use competition between teams or promoters to raise their value. In UFC, Thomas says, that bidding-war model barely exists because one company dominates the space and controls the terms.
Johnson compares it to Wimbledon having exclusive contracts with tennis players so they could not play anywhere else. It sounds absurd in tennis, but in MMA it is normal.
The Pay Is Often Far Worse Than Fans Think
The numbers Thomas shares are some of the strongest in the piece because they expose the gap between UFC’s image and many fighters’ reality.
Johnson says he made $8,000 to show and $8,000 to win. To some casual fans, $16,000 may sound decent at first glance, but that figure falls apart when you realize, as Johnson did, that he fought only once that year.
That meant $16,000 for the year.
Thomas also notes that fight-related costs come out of the fighters’ own pockets. Training, coaching, equipment, food, supplements, bloodwork, and the rest all eat into the money. If you are Conor McGregor, that is manageable. If you are one of the hundreds of other fighters on the roster, it can be crushing.
This is one of the most important points in the whole investigation.
Fans often see fighters on television and assume anyone in the UFC must be making serious money. But Thomas and Johnson show that a lot of them are living far closer to the edge than the brand suggests.
And then UFC took away another lifeline.
Johnson says fighters used to be able to make real money from their own sponsors, often more than from the fight itself. Then came the 2015 Reebok deal. Thomas says the UFC signed an exclusive $70 million agreement and banned personal sponsorships during fights and promotions.
Dana White said at the time that the money coming in was being passed to athletes. Johnson’s response in Thomas’ report is blunt: the company took 80 percent of their sponsorship dollars, money he says came right off fighters’ family tables.
That is hard to hear and even harder to defend.
Injuries Can Freeze Careers While The Bills Keep Coming
Thomas also highlights one of the ugliest features of the UFC contract system: if a fighter gets hurt and cannot compete, the contract can effectively be paused.
That means the fighter is not earning, but the UFC still keeps its hold.
Johnson describes this firsthand. In his first UFC fight, he was knocked out and his jaw was broken in three places. He says the injury and recovery made it very difficult to return to training. Since he could not fight, he was not getting paid.
But the contract stayed alive.
Thomas says contracts in other major sports do not work like that, and he is right to emphasize the contrast. In most major leagues, athletes have unions, collective bargaining agreements, some level of benefits, and a share of league revenue protected by negotiation.
UFC fighters, classified as independent contractors, get none of that. Thomas says they have no comprehensive health insurance, no pension, and no collective bargaining rights.
The result, Johnson argues, is predictable. Fighters compete hurt because they need money. Dana White, he says, pays them as little as possible so they stay desperate enough to fight whoever, whenever.
That is a harsh charge, but the economic logic behind it is easy to understand.
A Billion-Dollar Company Giving Fighters A Small Slice
Thomas says fighters receive roughly 17 percent of UFC revenue.
Then he gives the comparison that makes the imbalance impossible to ignore: NFL players, through their collective bargaining agreement, are guaranteed close to half of league revenue.
Even Joe Rogan, in a clip Thomas includes, says he thinks fighters should be paid more because of how dangerous the job is.
That point should not even be controversial. UFC’s product depends entirely on human beings taking extreme physical risks in front of millions. If those workers are getting a relatively small slice while the company signs multibillion-dollar deals, criticism is going to follow.
Former UFC champion Carlos Newton tells Thomas the system is designed to exploit the athlete. Johnson says UFC controls the title, the rankings, and the roster through exclusive contracts, which strips fighters of leverage.
That combination is why Thomas keeps returning to the monopoly question.
The issue is not just size. It is control.
The Monopoly Argument Has Been Around For Years
Thomas reminds viewers that this argument is not new.
Back in 2014, a group of former UFC fighters filed a class-action antitrust lawsuit accusing the UFC of monopolizing the MMA market and suppressing fighter pay. The case dragged on for a decade before UFC agreed in 2024 to pay $375 million while admitting no wrongdoing.
Carlos Newton tells Thomas that the settlement was disappointing because it meant the arguments were never fully aired in court. Then, in 2025, a second lawsuit was filed on behalf of more recent fighters.
Thomas says Dana White gets openly hostile whenever these lawsuits come up, and he includes clips showing that.
Still, the basic question remains: if one company can control the titles, the rankings, the contracts, the biggest venues, the biggest television deals, and most of the top talent, what exactly do you call that if not monopoly power?
Dana White may reject the label, but Thomas’ reporting makes the criticism sound less like rhetoric and more like a straightforward description of how the market now works.
UFC’s Boxing Push Is Making Some People Nervous
The investigation then widens beyond MMA.
Thomas says White, along with TKO, launched Zuffa Boxing last year and is now trying to bring the UFC model into boxing with powerful allies including Saudi official Turki Al-Sheikh. That matters because boxing, for all its flaws, has legal protections that MMA never got.
Thomas walks through the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act, passed in 2000, which required promoters to disclose financial details, barred certain conflicts of interest, restricted coercive long-term contracts, and stopped promoters from controlling rankings and titles in the same way.
In plain English, it was meant to stop one promoter from owning a fighter’s whole career.
Thomas says the UFC model cannot simply be dropped into boxing while those protections exist. So he points to new legislation, the Muhammad Ali American Boxing Revival Act, introduced by Republican Congressman Brian Jack and Democratic Congresswoman Sharice Davids.
On the surface, Thomas says, it sounds positive: minimum pay, better health protections, more safety. But fighters like Johnson call it a Trojan horse.
Buried inside, Thomas says, is a structure that would allow unified boxing organizations to control rankings, championships, and exclusive long-term contracts.
That sounds very familiar.
Johnson, in the report, sums up the concern sharply: if you give one company control over the whole industry, then of course that company will claim the sport will be better. Dana White himself says he wants to build boxing from the ground up with no sanctioning organizations and with his own belts, just like UFC.
Thomas’ point is clear. This is not just a story about UFC anymore. It is about whether the UFC model of centralized control is now being prepared for export into another combat sport.
Fighters And Fans End Up On The Same Side Of The Squeeze
The smartest thing Thomas does in this report is show that the fighter problem and the fan problem are really the same story.
When one company gets too much control, the workers lose leverage and the customers lose alternatives.
Fighters sign restrictive deals, struggle for fair pay, and stay quiet because speaking up can damage their careers. Fans pay more, get fewer choices, and watch a product that Thomas says may be getting watered down because elite athletes sometimes decide the terms are not worth it.
He points to Francis Ngannou, who left the UFC rather than accept its terms and had asked for things like better health insurance, sponsorship freedom for fighters, and a fighter advocate in negotiations. Dana White responded by dismissing him.
That episode says a lot. If even a heavyweight champion cannot get meaningful structural changes, what chance does the average undercard fighter really have?
By the end of the investigation, Thomas argues that this is what happens when greed lines up with political power. The people who assume the physical risk and the people paying to watch them are the ones who come out on the losing end.
That sounds harsh, but after hearing the numbers, the contracts, the injury stories, and the ticket prices, it is hard to say he has not built the case.
The UFC is bigger than ever. The company is richer than ever. Dana White has never looked more powerful.
But Luke Thomas’ report makes one thing plain: growth is not the same thing as fairness, and in the UFC’s biggest year yet, a lot of the people who built the sport are being asked to pay more while getting less.
