White reckons UFC will be the biggest sport by 2020

UFC President Dana White believes UFC will ‘be the biggest sport in the world by 2020’.

White laid out a ten-year plan for the UFC in a recent opinion editorial in the Las Vegas Sun newspaper.

He wrote: “UFC will be the biggest sport in the world by 2020.

“People were saying I was a lunatic 10 years ago when we first got this going, but the stuff we’re working on right now on so many levels is mind-boggling.

“The UFC will be on network television in the coming years, but we’re not going to go out and do a stupid deal because we don’t need them. We built this thing without help from anybody, and that’s why the UFC has been able to flourish even in these hard times.

“The sport was just sanctioned in Massachusetts and Vancouver. We’re going to get it done in Ontario and New York in 2010. And we’re already working on taking the UFC global. We’ve already done Germany, England and Ireland, and we just sold 22,000 seats for an event in Australia in 15 minutes.

“Think about this: Right now in the United States, there is nothing bigger than the NFL. It is huge. But the NFL has been spending billions of dollars trying to break into other countries and it’s not working. You know why? Because these people in other countries don’t care about American football. They didn’t grow up playing it and they’re not invested in American teams.

“I take two guys and put them in an octagon and they can use any martial art they want – that transcends all culture barriers. Right now we are on some form of television in over 175 countries. We’re all human beings and we all “get” fighting.”