‘Building this sport back up from ground zero’: White speaks on new boxing enterprise

Dana White says with the support of Turki Alalshikh, they will be reimagining the sport of boxing.

After today’s initial announcement of a new boxing promotion company that will create a boxing league, Dana White — who will run the company — speaks about their plans going forward along with some excerpts from Alalshikh himself. Here’s what they had to say about rebuilding the sport as we know it.

White on his plans for new boxing league

“There’s a lot of young talent out there, up-and-coming talent that people don’t know about, and we’re going to stack cards from the first fight of the night to the main event that are packed with good fights. You’re going to see a lot of guys who are undefeated fighting their way up to win the world title.

“My big beef with boxing has always been nobody has ever invested back into the sport, yet you have all these promoters who take, take, take and never reinvest. Nobody in the history of the sport has invested more money into boxing in such a short amount of time as Turki has.

“Now that we’ve got the deal done, what we do now is start to build the infrastructure. We’ve got to build a team, then we have to go out and get a rights deal. Whoever we end up doing a deal with we can structure this thing to whatever the network needs. We can put on as many fights as they want.

“When we started the UFC they had like 12 contracts...We’re going to have Olympians, we’re going to have guys that are already undefeated out there and have established records, plus Turki has a lot of commitments for some of the big fights with some of they guys that are out there right now. There’s a lot of fun, exciting fights to make out there, and you know how I run shows — the live events will all change, it will be much better than anything you’ve ever seen before.

“You won’t have one fight and then a podcast happens, and then another fight happens 45 minutes later and you see four fights in six hours. All of that stuff is going to change when we start running the show”

Alalshikh on partnering with White to run the company

“Dana, he have very big experience, he have the machine of TKO and he’s bulldozer. He will go and clean the way and we’re behind him. I give him yesterday the flag and the headache at the same time, and I say to him ‘come on, clean the field.’”

Whyte on whether we might see some of his UFC fighters crossover to boxing under this new endeavor

“No, never. I think there are (UFC) guys that want to box but I literally don’t want to see any of that. I think we’ll keep the boxing guys in boxing and the MMA guys in MMA.

“What we care about is finding the young, up-and-coming talent and building these fights up to find out who is the best is in each weight class, and there won’t be six different champions in each weight class. There will be one. You will know who the best heavyweight is, the best light heavyweight is...people will actually know.”

Alalshikh on his vision for the direction of the company

“We care about you, the young generation. When I came to boxing I had a lot of studies, the average [age] of the fans became 40+. The reason, no one want to take the risk in the big fights, as Dana said, long, long event, different platform to see the event[s], no big fights — for that, the young generation doesn’t care.

“Now we are focusing a lot, at the same time — also with UFC — [at] the same time we want video games, we want animation, we want movies, we want a lot of things, merchandise. A lot of things will happen. And with the relationship with TKO, they have the experience, and the relationship with [Dana White], this man built franchise from scratch. We will [succeed].”

White on the first planned event they’ll hold on September 12

“When it’s time to announce, we have a massive fight — literally a massive fight that only this guy [Alalashikh] could make happen. This guy is the only guy that can make a fight like this happen. We will announce it when we’re ready to but [Alalshikh] has brought boxing back, this is Day 1, we’re making our announcement and we’re going to start building this sport back up from ground zero.”