TKO President Mark Shapiro Feels FOX Sports Was ‘A Little Lazy’ With Their Monetization Of UFC

Mark Shapiro looks back at the FOX-UFC deal.

From 2011 to 2018, UFC aired on FOX Sports. That partnership was broken down by TKO President and Chief Operating Officer Mark Shapiro on the newest episode of The Main Event with Andrew Marchand.

Shapiro explained why he feels FOX Sports was ‘a little lazy’ with their monetization of UFC:

“So, when it came to the first ESPN deal, we were on FOX with UFC, and frankly, FOX was having a tough time monetizing it, because the UFC in those days was hard to monetize, right? Combat sports, blood on the mat, wasn’t as mainstream as it is today, didn’t do the kind of numbers, was still in the building phase, and I would argue FOX was a little lazy. It takes work to sell a UFC, especially in those days. When I was with ESPN, I would get on top of my sales guys like, ‘Don’t tell me that you’re selling SportsCenter. That’s total bullsh*t. SportsCenter sells itself.’ ‘Hello!?’ ‘Yes, we’ll take your order.’ That’s the sell of SportsCenter. Everybody wants SportsCenter. Tell me how you’re selling hunting. Tell me how you’re selling fishing. In those days, how you’re selling Major League Soccer. Tell me how you’re selling tennis, golf, A.T.P., that stuff’s hard. NFL? Come on. Those are premiums. It’s how high you can get. It’s when you strike, when the CPMs are, how you create a supply and demand market. That’s a whole different story. So, for us, FOX really wasn’t aggressive or didn’t know how to package it or didn’t have enough sports, didn’t have the right strategy, or didn’t put the effort in or had a bad sales team. I don’t know what to tell you. But they weren’t selling it well. So, they came to us and said, ‘We wanna renew. Because the demos had been great for us, but we wanna take down the rights fee.’ Go south. Well, now we have to create a market because we’re obviously not going back to FOX.”

Under the TKO Group Holdings umbrella, this past August, UFC finalized a seven-year, $7.7 billion media rights deal with Paramount, which will begin in 2026.

If the quote in this article is used, please credit The Main Event with Andrew Marchand with an H/T to Fightful for the transcription.