Justin Gaethje ended the June night on the South Lawn by finishing Ilia Topuria in the fourth round to take the lightweight title, closing a card on which every fight was stopped inside the distance, a first in UFC history. Two months later, Dana White is still saying the same thing about a rerun.
“I mean, there’ll never be anything like the White House ever again,” White told The Pat McAfee Show in mid-August.
“That night, we already had high expectations for it, and I was blown away.”
That echoes what the UFC boss said in the pre-dawn press conference at the JW Marriott the morning after Freedom 250, when he put the tab at more than $60m and made plain the promotion had swallowed the loss for one night only.
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“I can’t afford it,” White told reporters.
“We’ll never do the Sphere again, and we’ll never do this again.”
The scale of what the UFC pulled off in June
Freedom 250, staged on Sunday 14 June to coincide with Donald Trump’s 80th birthday, put a temporary cage and a 4,300-seat arena on the South Lawn, with a weekend-long fan festival on the Ellipse that drew more than 200,000 people across free public sessions.
Two title bouts headlined a seven-fight card that ended, unusually, in seven straight stoppages. Gaethje’s fourth-round TKO of Topuria closed the night; in the co-main, Ciryl Gane stopped Alex Pereira in the second round to take the interim heavyweight belt.
The bill came in above $60m even after corporate partners chipped in, according to Just The News, citing the cost White himself put on the event. White had told TIME magazine before Freedom 250 that the promotion expected to eat around $30m of the total.
A “cocky” producer and an “impossible” idea
Whatever White does next, he has been clear it will not be another lap on the South Lawn. He is instead working through an idea his head of production, Craig Borsari, brought to him after Freedom 250.
“My head of production Craig Borsari is so cocky after he absolutely killed that event,” White told McAfee.
“We are talking about something right now that he came up with. This was his idea, and I love it. I have to do some more groundwork on it.”
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White has taken to calling it the “impossible event”. He said on the same show he had a couple of calls to make once UFC 330 was out of the way, before Borsari flew out to walk the site. UFC 330 in Philadelphia was staged on 15 August; no location, date or concept for the new show has been made public since.
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