LAS VEGAS — According to UFC president Dana White, Saturday’s lightweight championship fight between Khabib Nurmagomedov and Conor McGregor is projecting to smash company records in both pay-per-view revenue and gate revenue in the state of Nevada.
Late last month, White told Yahoo! Sports he was confident Saturday’s UFC 229 pay-per-view offering, which comes at a price tag of $64.99, would surpass 2 million buys.
On Tuesday, White told ESPN that number is now tracking closer to 3 million.
“This thing is breaking every record we’ve ever had as far as numbers go,” White said. “If you look at Mayweather-McGregor [August 2017], the first episode of [online promotional series] Embedded, in 24 hours, did 800,000 views. This one did 1.7 million.
“If you look at the most popular, when we did the world tour press conferences [with Mayweather, McGregor], London was the biggest [stop]. Over the last year, that’s done 4.7 million views. In the last two weeks, since the [New York press conference with Nurmagomedov and McGregor], we’re almost at 4.7 million views.
“I told you guys we were trending at 2 million pay-per-view buys. We’re trending closer to 3 million pay-per-view buys.”
The UFC does not release official pay-per-view figures after events, but the company has never had an event reportedly hit 2 million buys. Last year’s hybrid event featuring Mayweather and McGregor reportedly sold 4.4 million buys.
White also said the sold-out event will set a new record in Las Vegas, for the highest-grossing gate for a mixed martial arts event. White said the gate projects near $17 million. Currently, the highest UFC gate in Las Vegas is UFC 200 in July 2016, which generated $10.7 million.
“There have been massive ticket sales from the U.K. and Ireland,” White said. “This is also the largest gate we’ve ever done in Las Vegas and second-biggest gate in UFC history. This thing is going to come in $17 million.
“This is the biggest fight we’ve ever done. Normally, we don’t ever sell the section behind me, those are our tickets we comp. The first two rows to our left, we call it ‘Celeb row,’ those are all the fighters — no fighters got tickets to this fight. Daniel Cormier will be there, he bought three tickets. I bought tickets. [Endeavor CEO] Ari Emanuel bought tickets. This if the first time we’ve split the media section in half. We sold half that section. We’ve never done that before either.”