Going into Saturday night’s UFC 205: Alvarez vs. McGregor mega-event it was already known that the UFC had broken their all-time gate record, as well as the combat sports gate record for the world-famous Madison Square Garden arena. It was also known that UFC would make history by holding their first-ever event in the state of New York and that with a win over Eddie Alvarez in the event’s headline bout, Conor McGregor would make history as the first simultaneous two-division world champion in the history of the promotion.
What wasn’t known was that was only going to be the tip of the iceberg.
During the UFC 205 post-fight press conference held after the event very late Saturday evening / early Sunday morning, UFC President Dana White spoke with members of the media in attendance, where he claimed that the show “broke every record in history.”
“Sitting here tonight, we broke every record in UFC history tonight. Every record,” a proud White said of what will likely be the most lucrative one-night event in the UFC record books for some time to come. “The only one I’m waiting on now is the FOX number, how did FOX Sports 1 do and it would be really, really weird and make no sense if we didn’t break that record, too.”
Regarding the new UFC and MSG gate records that UFC 205 set this past weekend, White claimed that he can’t fathom what fight could be put together that would ever touch the numbers Saturday’s show generated at the box office.
“We broke the Madison Square Garden record, which I don’t think will ever be broken again,” White said. “Jesus is going to have to fight the Devil to break that record. I just don’t see what does it.”
While generally White won’t give an answer of any kind regarding what type of business a particular UFC event did on pay-per-view, when asked if “breaking every record” included the all-time pay-per-view record, which would be close to two million buys according to estimates for past shows such as UFC 100, UFC 200 and UFC 202, the boss man actually sorta-kinda did give one this time around.
“Very good,” said White regarding how the show did on PPV. “We did. We broke the [pay-per-view] record.”
H/T to FOX Sports for transcribing the above Dana White quotes from the UFC 205 post-fight press conference.
