It’s been a while since a month on the UFC calendar featured a show at the Apex in Las Vegas, but perhaps that could change soon.
After completion of UFC on ESPN 56 Louis, UFC CEO Dana White revealed that the promotion’s all-time UFC Fight Night record was broken with a whopping $2,470,197 at the door.
“Even if you were watching on ESPN, I’m sure you were also getting text messages like, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s like pay-per-view on there right now,’” White told reporters at his post-2020 press conference. fight. . “And when you think about how we built this business, we realized that it was being taken away from the big markets.
“When we got into the fight business, everyone went to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, sometimes New York, sometimes Los Angeles. Those were the only places where fights actually happened, unless you had a local boy who fought. We built this business to bring this to every city in the world. As we start to get our act together, I’m going to wrap it up and start moving around and going to these different cities like we used to, the whole sport goes to another level.
UFC Apex events began in 2020 following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to hold lower-cost shows in Las Vegas and comply with government protocols.
Although all signs pointed to the internal change being temporary, the venue still hosted dozens of UFC events in the years that followed: 29 in 2020; 42 in 2021; 29 in 2022; and 27 in 2023. By the end of August, the promotion will have held 15 events at the UFC Apex in 2024.
While White has long indicated he wants to move away from in-house shows at the UFC Apex, he said 2024 will be the year the promotion ramps up its roadshows even further.
“I’ve been saying this for a long time,” White said. “We need to get out of Apex and start doing more events in all these different cities. We are starting to do this. We are able to do that this year.”
For more information on the card, visit the MMA Junkie events hub to UFC on ESPN 56.
