When the UFC was purchased for $4.2 billion in the summer, there was plenty of speculation as to how things could change in the promotions direction.
Although the new regime has brought around some differences — high profile employee lay offs for instance — the high standards of the UFC seems to have been mostly consistent with the vision that the Fertitta brothers had.
One difference that fans might not be aware of, however, are new levels of control backstage. Even for UFC President Dana White.
“The difference between now and the old days,” White said, speaking to TSN’s Michael Landsberg. “Lorenzo, Frank and I used to have loosey-goosey budgets, and we would say ‘you wanna do this? let’s do it’ and we’d just do it. Here, the new company is very budget driven. Budgets are very much a part.
“I’ll give you the perfect example. I don’t know if you saw the cartoon that we did. I went out and hired the guy who started Ren and Stimpy, and we did these cartoons of the UFC. It was astronomical what it cost to do those, but I wanted to do them. I’m a huge fan of Adult Swim and we put them on Adult Swim. I wanted to do it, so I did it. If I wanted to do something like that these days; we’d have to get the budget approved.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVAXmPgsi5w
