By Larry Goldberg
In Part One I mapped the two sides, the machine and the vault. This time we follow the money, because the money tells you what they are actually building and how long they plan to take doing it.
The Megafight Is the Marketing
Start at the top, where the old model still lives. The megafight. Canelo and Crawford on Netflix last September, two of the best on the planet in a stadium, the kind of one-off boxing has always run on. Fury and Joshua is the next one, headed to Netflix too. Huge nights, huge money, Turki Alalshikh’s checkbook behind both. If you only watch this level, you would think nothing has changed, because this is exactly how boxing has always worked, one giant event at a time.
But for the machine, the megafight is the marketing, not the business. It is the billboard that pulls the casual fan in. The traditional model was built around these nights, a few superfights a year with everything riding on them, fighters protecting their records for years to keep their price up, the whole sport holding its breath in between. Zuffa is using the megafight to sell the thing underneath it.
Inside the Machine
Drop down a level and you find the actual machine. The Zuffa Boxing schedule, at least 12 numbered cards on Paramount+ in 2026 with the biggest ones simulcast on CBS, and a roster of fighters signed to the promotion the way UFC fighters are signed. Jai Opetaia, who won the first Zuffa cruiserweight belt back in March. Conor Benn, reportedly signed for around $15 million, pulled straight out of Eddie Hearn’s stable after a decade together. Names getting locked into a system, not booked one fight at a time.
If this play looks new to boxing, it is not new to Zuffa. Eddie Alvarez has told the story of how it worked on him. When the UFC wanted Bellator dead, it did not buy the promotion the way it bought Strikeforce and Pride. Lorenzo Fertitta flew to Florida, sat across from Bellator’s best asset, and cut him a check on the spot, championship money, around $250,000, before Alvarez had fought a single round in the UFC. Snipe the star, and you cut the legs out from under the promotion without paying for the whole thing. Swap the names and you have 2026: Benn out of Matchroom, Opetaia with his belts, and Stevenson made official in the same news cycle as the PBC and DAZN deal. Zuffa is not trying to buy Matchroom or Top Rank. It does not have to.
Follow that money down and the whole philosophy jumps out. Unranked fighters on these cards have reportedly been paid in the $10,000 to $20,000 range per fight, with $50,000 and $100,000 bonuses handed out on the night for the best performances, straight out of the UFC playbook. That is small next to a Canelo purse. But it is steady, it is frequent, and it runs all year, and in this business steady beats spectacular more often than fans think. The bet is simple. No single fighter should be bigger than the platform. The brand is the draw. You run good cards constantly instead of betting the company on three nights a year, and you never hand out the kind of over-leveraged guarantee that has buried independent promoters for decades.
You can tell how disruptive the spend is by who is complaining. UFC fighters are watching boxers out-earn them and saying so out loud. Michael “Venom” Page put it plainly: “Zuffa are treating boxers better than UFC fighters. I think it’s wrong. I think it’s been wrong for a long time.” When your new venture’s pay scale has your own roster asking why the boxers get more, you are not playing small.
You want to know how big the money really is? Listen to the other side admit it. Johnny Fisher, one of Hearn’s own heavyweights, says Zuffa offered him six or seven times what Matchroom would pay. And Hearn did not fight to keep him. He said flat out that if the offer were half what it was he still would not have matched it, and told Fisher it was a brilliant opportunity he should take with both hands. The loudest promoter in the vault just told one of his own fighters to go take the machine’s money, because he cannot compete with it. That is not a man losing a bidding war. That is a man who knows there is no bidding war to be had.
That does not mean the old guard has nothing. Hearn, Warren, Arum, De La Hoya, they hold deep fighter relationships, decades of knowing how this sport actually works, and the ability to make a single fight fast without running it past a board. That is real, and it is not nothing. What they do not have is the capital and the broadcast reach to do it at scale, all year, every year. They can still win the fight in front of them. They are losing the war for the structure underneath it.
Now, before we go further, let me kill a myth you hear constantly. People say Zuffa is just Saudi money that could vanish tomorrow, and if it dries up the fighters are stuck holding a dead company. That misreads how this is built. The boxing runs on Paramount’s money and TKO’s balance sheet, a signed multi-year broadcast deal and a publicly traded company behind it. The Saudis are partners, not life support. This is not LIV Golf, where the whole thing only exists as long as the checks keep coming from one place. Could the ambition shrink if the appetite cooled? Sure. But shrink is not the same as switch off. The base is funded, with or without another dollar of Saudi money.
A Balance Sheet With a Spokesman
And this is where the press keeps getting the whole story wrong. They frame it as Dana versus Eddie, two loud promoters trading shots, because that is the old way of seeing boxing, one guy against another guy. But that framing is the tell that people still do not understand what they are looking at. Behind Dana White sits Ari Emanuel, the CEO of TKO. Mark Shapiro, the president who runs the operation day to day. Nick Khan. A board, a controlling owner in Endeavor, Silver Lake money, the Saudi partners, and now Paramount. Eddie Hearn is a man. Dana White is the face of a corporation. When you frame it as two promoters in a feud, you have already lost the plot, because only one side is a person and the other side is a balance sheet with a spokesman.
You want to see that chain of command in action? Watch what happened with Joshua and Fury. Dana White went public claiming he was promoting the fight, that he knew the date and the venue. Then the posts came down. Hearn says Alalshikh personally made Zuffa delete them. Take Hearn’s version with a grain of salt, he is the rival. But you do not have to take his word for it, because the part you can see lines up. The posts vanished. And Fury himself then posted that his promoter is Turki Alalshikh. This is not a knock on Dana. He is the face of something bigger than any one person, and that is exactly the point.
That is also why Hearn is worth watching, even as he loses ground. He is the last great personality promoter, and he is having the time of his life. With Alalshikh pushing to broker a sit-down, Hearn went on talkSPORT and said the quiet part out loud. “I don’t want peace talks. I want war talks. Because I had 15 years of war, and it was the greatest time of my career.” That is the tell. Hearn is enjoying a personality war, promoter against promoter, the game he knows. But the thing across from him is a corporation, not another promoter, and a corporation does not fight that war or feel it. The man enjoying the fight is the one who still thinks it is a fight between two men.
Oscar De La Hoya put his finger on the real difference without quite meaning to. Trying to make Ryan Garcia against Conor Benn, he blamed Zuffa for the holdup. “Whenever Zuffa Boxing gets involved, it’s always a f— up,” he said. “We all work great together as promoters, except when Zuffa gets involved.” The old world ran on promoters cooperating with each other, a club of personalities who made fights with handshakes and favors. The machine is not in that club, and it does not need to be. It is a corporation running its own system, and that is exactly what drives the old guard crazy.
And he is not just talking. Golden Boy sent a cease-and-desist to Zuffa, TKO, Paramount, and Sela to freeze the Garcia and Benn fight Zuffa was trying to make for September. Garcia even announced it himself on Jimmy Fallon, a date in Las Vegas, before a contract existed. The problem is that Golden Boy holds co-promotional rights to Garcia and a clause that his fights air on DAZN, and Zuffa wanted the bout on its own platforms. DAZN fired off its own cease-and-desist over the broadcast rights. Two letters, one over who promotes, one over who airs it. That is the whole map in a single fight. The machine has the money to sign anyone and the platforms to show them, but it ran straight into the one weapon the vault still has, the contracts. This is where the new reality meets the old paper, and the old paper does not just fold.
And then there is Bob Arum, who has promoted this sport since the 1960s, from Ali to Hagler to Pacquiao. Asked about Zuffa in an interview with Fight Hub TV, he did not hold back. “Dana White really is a cancer for boxing. You come in and you want to get rid of all the sanctioning bodies. They’ve just lost a lawsuit for 350 million. They’re about to lose another lawsuit for 400 million. Why? Because they pay their fighters peanuts. If they got a foothold in boxing, it would be the same thing. I just think that Dana White would end up to be a cancer for the sport of boxing. I don’t like how he operated in the UFC, underpaying all these fighters.”
Hearn, De La Hoya, Arum. Three generations of the people who built boxing, all looking at the same thing.
Setting Up Shop, Market by Market
Then there is the part that tells you the real scale of this. Nick Khan, the man who runs WWE and sits on the TKO board, has been spotted working a headset at small Zuffa boxing cards, hands-on at events a fraction the size of a WrestleMania. When the man who runs WrestleMania is wearing one at a club-sized card, I know exactly what that means, and it is not a side project. That is somebody building something he expects to get very big, and building the machine by running it himself.
And the machine promotes its fighters in ways no boxing promoter ever could. Not long ago, newly signed Zuffa boxers were showcased across TKO’s platform during WWE Raw and SmackDown at The O2 in London. Middleweight Lee Cutler sat ringside next to UFC star Michael Page. Alex MacMillan got a shoutout on the big screen in front of the WWE crowd. The McKenna brothers, Aaron and Stevie, met WWE talent and got pulled into the spotlight. In a sport where fighters usually get promoted only during fight week, the machine is introducing its boxers to millions of casual fans who never bought a ticket to a fight in their lives. Aaron McKenna fights for the vacant IBF middleweight title on August 8 in Dublin. The pipeline is already running.
And they are not keeping it in one country. In March, Zuffa signed a multi-year deal with Sky Sports for the UK and Ireland, with a commitment to at least five shows a year on British soil. Read where that flag got planted. Sky is the home of British boxing, the network that carried Bruno and Hatton and Joshua at Wembley, and it lost Matchroom to DAZN back in 2021. Zuffa just walked into that empty throne. That is the move, market by market, taking the most valuable broadcast real estate in each country rather than renting a room one night at a time. They are not running shows. They are setting up shop.
And do not make the mistake of thinking the vault is staying a scrappy independent while this happens. Matchroom took on investment from Bruin Capital, which means Hearn answers to backers of his own now. The whole sport is institutionalizing, not just Zuffa. The difference is the machine started bigger and is building faster.
There is also the reach no fight promoter has ever had: in June, TKO put a UFC card on the South Lawn of the White House. The MMA and political press have covered that one to death, and it is not for this column to relitigate. But no promoter in boxing history has had a line that runs straight to that address, and that tells you what the machine is wired into.
The Long Game
Step back and it is a pyramid. A megafight ceiling that sells the sport to the world, a league in the middle that runs all year on signed fighters and steady pay, and a developmental floor underneath quietly feeding the system from below, all of it wired into broadcast, arenas, and a global touring operation. The old model only ever had the top. Superfights and a giant gap underneath, nothing connecting one night to the next.
This is why one card on one night misses the entire point. You are using the old model’s scorecard on a company that threw the scorecard out. The old guard sells you an event. The machine is building a system, and a system takes years to show its full shape. The UFC looked small and clumsy for a long time before it was an empire. Dana White and the Fertittas lost money for years building floors nobody could see yet. They are running the same playbook in boxing right now, in real time, out in the open, and a lot of smart people are going to keep calling it a flop right up until the day it obviously is not.
None of that makes Zuffa perfect or finished. The early cards have been getting better, the developmental layer is still thin, and the single-belt structure they want is blocked by the Ali Act for now. They are pouring the floors first and waiting on the law to catch up. Sitting right underneath all of it is the real fight that is coming, fighter compensation and rights in a signed-roster model, and that is a story for another day.
But this is not just another promoter with deeper pockets. One side runs on big nights, personal relationships, and treaties between promoters. The other is trying to run a year-round league with signed talent, steady pay, and a corporation behind it. Whether it works, or gets pulled back by the law or fighter pushback or its own execution, is still open. What is not open anymore is whether it is real. It is.
Then came the clearest picture yet of the split. Turki Alalshikh called his summit, four hours in London, Hearn and Warren and the DAZN people all at the table, the peace talks meant to cool the whole thing down. Dana White did not show. Asked about it beforehand, he said he was good, that he did not know what the issues even were, and named the NFL and the NBA as his real competition, not anyone in that room. Zuffa sent Nick Khan, and when the promoters gathered for the photo, Khan was not in it. Turki posted him separately. Everyone in one picture, the machine in its own. A summit called to show unity ended up showing the opposite, and it put the map from Part One right there in a photograph.
And nothing got settled. Hearn, who was in the room, said it plainly afterward. A couple of hours of talking and listening, the first real conversation he had ever had with Nick Khan, and then this: “Did we get anything done or resolved? No. On all levels, really.” So the peace talks did not make peace. They made the divide official. What happens next, whether the machine keeps building straight through the old guard or the two sides find a way to coexist, is the story from here. That is where this goes.
Part Three: the peace talks are over, the war is not, and the vault just fired back. Coming soon on Boxing Insider.
Larry Goldberg is the founder of Boxing Insider Promotions and publisher of BoxingInsider.com, online since 1998.
