UFC at White House a success, but never again, Dana White says

WASHINGTON — Dana White stood at the dais with the winning fighters flanking him at 3 a.m. Monday, hours after the UFC president and CEO completed one of the more audacious events of his career, a fight card on the South Lawn of the White House. He made one thing clear.

He’s never doing this again.

“I can’t afford it,” White said. “I’ll never do the Sphere again, and we’ll never do this again.”

White kept to what he insisted for months, that the White House card would be a “one-of-one” event and not the beginning of a trend, similar to how he viewed his promotion playing host to the first sporting event at the Sphere in Las Vegas in 2024.

Yet White insisted that Sunday night’s UFC Freedom 250 exceeded all of his expectations for what he had called the biggest event in the history of his promotion and perhaps the biggest in the history of mixed martial arts.

White declined to provide specifics but indicated UFC hit the numbers it sought for its $60 million production.

“In every way you can gauge success,” White said.

The merchandise, he said, hit all-time metrics. He said the numbers on Paramount were “monstrous” and estimated 200,000 people were on the Ellipse over his two-day fan fest. Even the weather, which threatened to create massive delays Sunday night, largely held off and turned into a pleasant Washington, D.C., evening after a slight delay.

Despite that, White made clear that he does not want to do more outdoor fights because of the uncontrollable variables. He said he and President Donald Trump had discussed doing a fight for troops in 2027 but coordinating with the military to have fights on military bases takes time.

“He wanted to do it this year,” White said. “And I said, sir, I need a year to recover financially.”

He also pushed back, again, at critics who didn’t want to see a UFC event at federal landmarks and questioned the legal legitimacy for the promotion to do so. It led to an injunction lawsuit that failed Friday, allowing the news conference at the Lincoln Memorial on Friday and the fights on the South Lawn on Sunday to proceed.

“F— ’em. I don’t give a s— about them,” White said. “It’s like when they were asking me about the lawsuit. I don’t give a s—. I got lawyers. They’ll figure that out. I don’t care.”

White called the main event, where Justin Gaethje upset Ilia Topuria to win the lightweight title, “one of the greatest fights you’ll ever see” and the overall card, which saw every fight end with a stoppage, “great.”

White admitted rare reflection over the past two weeks about the path of his promotion in conversations with Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, who initially invested in the UFC with White. Frank Fertitta, White said, was in attendance Sunday.

Last month, White told ESPN that he rarely looks back at events and hoped he would have time to take in the enormity of being at the White House at some point during the week — even if he thought it was unlikely he would do so.

“There’s been a lot of reflecting over the last few weeks with the Fertitta brothers and me,” White said. “Sent a text to me almost every night, and then Frank and his family flew out tonight to watch.”

White insisted he wasn’t holding a political event despite the location of the fights and his friendship with Trump and that he didn’t care about the critiques. He said he did media no matter the political affiliation.

He and his staff went about their planning to celebrate the United States’ birthday with its pre-produced videos between fights and everything they tried to create besides what occurred inside the cage and that he wanted all Americans to watch and enjoy what he put on at the White House.

“I love this country, and this event was for America’s 250th birthday. There was no political agenda or anything like that,” White said. “The fact that the president of the United States trusted me, they could have had anything. There’s tons of things going on in this city up until July 4 to celebrate. The fact that he trusted me to do this and to deliver tonight and we did.”