PPVs way down? UFC and ESPN have been in ‘a bad marriage for years’

Things are starting to get heated between ESPN and UFC as their exclusive negotiation window narrows for a new broadcast deal in 2026.

UFC signed with the worldwide leader in sports back in 2018 for a blistering $800 million a year, and for a while it seemed like everything was great. The combat sports promotion drove subscribers to ESPN+, which became the exclusive home in the United States for nearly all UFC events and pay-per-views. UFC got the ESPN rub, which involved a lot of promotional push across the entire corporate network.

But with UFC looking to bag a new deal worth a billion per year and ESPN limping into 2025 a money loser for Disney, we’re looking at what appears to be a slow-moving break up. And that was before ESPN+ s—t the bed (again) a week ago, resulting in few people being able to buy UFC 313.

The New York Post’s Erich Richter posted an article talking about how UFC brass were ‘furious’ that the event was hobbled by technical difficulties. And now he’s on a NY Post Sports podcast giving more context to the relationship between ESPN and UFC.

“ESPN has pretty much stopped putting UFC programming on cable TV, whether that be ABC, ESPN2, ESPN,” Richter said. “If ESPN isn’t putting UFC on their cable broadcast, I feel like that is indicative of how they feel about each other right now.”

That dissatisfaction comes from pay-per-view numbers being ‘way, way down.’

“The UFC gets [paid] 300,000 pay-per-view buys as a ‘buy in’ from ESPN,” Richter explained. “There’s no way that ESPN is getting 300,000 pay-per-view buys out out of every pay-per-view, from what I was told. So this has been a bad marriage in the last couple years for both parties. UFC is frustrated that the technology that ESPN [uses] is not up to speed yet, and ESPN is frustrated because they’re not getting the pay-per-view buys that they had expected.”

Yes, there’s something to be said for the middling PPV cards the UFC has been delivering since they no longer have to worry about how many units each one sells. But ESPN+ has a well-earned reputation as a terrible service which will swallow your payment and not even give you access to the event you just bought. It will stutter and die and jank out just as bad as an illegal stream.

So if you’re a fan, where’s the incentive to pay 80 dollars to a company that won’t even help you (and definitely won’t refund you) if their service stops working?

Fortunately for the UFC, they have a bigger, better suitor waiting in the wings: Netflix. The streaming giant recently signed a massive $5 billion deal with WWE, also owned by UFC parent company TKO. According to Erich Richter, all signs point to a similar deal for their MMA product.

“When I put that article out on Sunday night, I got a call from somebody who’s pretty well connected,” he said. “And he said, ‘Almost definitely Netflix.’”

“Now where it gets interesting is Netflix is seemingly unwilling at this point to dive into the pay per view model. Mark Shapiro had said that they’re willing to be flexible, and that’s, when it comes to the pay per view model, it works for them is what they said, but they said they’re willing to be flexible.”

Netflix doesn’t have to get into the pay-per-view business because they’re already in the tier business. Over the years, their ‘one subscription fits all’ model changed to eliminate password-sharing, and then stratified into lower resolution and higher resolution tiers. Now there’s Standard with Ads ($7.99), Standard ($17.99), and Premium ($24.99).

It doesn’t take a business degree to anticipate how Netflix could split the UFC’s programming up: put the weekly events on Standard with Ads and the pay-per-views on Premium.

But that’s just speculation on our part at this point. The main takeaway from this reporting? ESPN and UFC are starting to duke it out in public as each attempts to gain leverage coming into April, which marks the end of their exclusive negotiation period.