At Wednesday's UFC 254 pre-fight press conference, president Dana White said he was aiming for the biggest PPV buys in league history, and to further the stature of Khabib Nurmagomedov as an international superstar.
“The reality is this … Khabib is one of the biggest stars in all of sports, not just the UFC,” said White. “Khabib’s videos have generated 220 million views. The content that features him, over 100 million views just on Facebook. He’s broken records on Instagram. I could rattle off numbers all day here. He’s by far the No. 1 most played character in the [UFC] video game, globally, by a long shot.”
Justin Gaethje said he's fighting to be the best lightweight on the planet, and he's fighting for his parents' financial security.
“My parents have never flown international,” said Gaethje. “They got to fly business They’ve never flown business >
“My dad retired a little over a year ago. He worked 37 years in the copper mines. My mom is going to retire…If this fight starts, if that bell rings at the beginning, then I will secure that she will retire after the fight. Every piece of money they had went into me and my brother and sister. We were two hours from any city. Going school clothes shopping was a vacation for us. We’d get up and go to wrestling tournaments … they financially took hits every single time that we did that. Nothing is better on earth than to be able to repay that.”
And Dana gets the last word.
"These come together every once in a while," said White. "it’s not one of these fights where these two need to scream at each other. People know who both of these guys are, they know what they’re both capable of and that’s why this fight is so big.”
Me and my friends are not looking at our phones cause we wanna watch the whole card at a reasonable time.
For people watching live at 2pm yeah it'll be huge..... After all said and done it'll be the biggest ppv probably
One thing you have to be careful about is the ESPN+ app being janky at times.
I have watched an event after it started and chose the “Start from beginning” option. I’ve started watching and had it randomly skip to LIVE on it’s own a couple of times.
Not a super common occurrence, but it ruined Zombie/Ortega for me as it skipped to Ortega being interviewed after the fight, while I was originally only like 30 minutes into the main card right before it skipped.
Had it happen on a PPV once too, but luckily nothing of importance was given away.