The Half-Billion-Dollar-Hole in the World’s Most Exciting Sport

How does a company lose over half a billion dollars and still get called a success? This isn’t a riddle; it’s the central mystery of ONE Championship, the Singapore-based fight promotion that has taken Asia by storm.

Fighters wearing small, four-ounce gloves engage in a whirlwind of Muay Thai violence. The pace is breathtaking, the knockouts are explosive, and the content feels perfectly engineered to dominate social media feeds.

And it works. ONE Championship has built a massive global audience, generating billions of video views and cultivating a devoted following across Asia. By every visible metric of passion and reach, it is a roaring success.

But this spectacle of violence and viral fame is built on a foundation of staggering financial loss. This is the story ONE Championship doesn’t promote. The numbers, filed quietly in Singapore, reveal a different reality. According to its 2023 financial statements, ONE posted a consolidated loss of $90 million. This brought the company's cumulative losses to over half a billion dollars, with just over $24 million in net assets remaining at the end of that year.

How does a company that has burned through a fortune large enough to fund a blockbuster movie franchise stay in business? Through the unwavering support of its investors, most notably the Qatar Investment Authority, which has repeatedly injected fresh capital, including a reported $50 million lifeline in October 2024, to keep the operation running.

This struggle is most apparent in ONE's ambitious push into the American market. In 2022, the promotion announced a multi-year deal with Amazon Prime Video, a move hailed as its grand entry into the lucrative U.S. media landscape. Yet, this partnership has come to reveal the gap between presentation and reality. By mid-2025, industry reports began to surface, claiming that Amazon would not be renewing the deal after its initial term expires. While ONE's leadership has publicly denied these claims, Amazon itself has remained silent. Perhaps most telling is what viewers don't see: for a property that is supposedly a major live sports partner, ONE Championship is rarely, if ever, promoted heavily on the Prime Video platform, often buried deep within the service's menus.

To understand the depth of ONE’s financial predicament, you must first look at the unparalleled success of its American rival. As a cornerstone of the publicly-traded TKO Group Holdings, the UFC generated a record $1.406 billion in revenue in 2024. Its financial dominance is not accidental; it’s the result of a ruthless and brilliant business model. The UFC’s fortress is built on a foundation of massive, guaranteed revenue from broadcast partners like ESPN, fortified by nine-figure sponsorship deals with global brands that plaster their logos across the Octagon, and topped off with a direct line to its fans’ wallets through the Fight Pass subscription service and high-priced pay-per-view events.

This stark contrast sets the stage for a compelling strategic question. On one side, you have ONE: a company with a captivating product but a business that hemorrhages cash. On the other, the UFC: a machine that reliably prints money but faces a maturing domestic market.

Could a merger solve both problems?

Could the UFC’s business discipline save ONE from its own financial implosion while giving the UFC its next great growth story? On paper, the logic of combining these two giants seems undeniable.

In reality, the path to such a deal is a minefield of legal, cultural, and financial obstacles that may be impossible to overcome.

The Seductive Logic of a Megadeal

The case for a merger is powerful because the two organizations are almost perfect opposites. They are two halves of a global combat sports empire, each holding the key to the other’s greatest weakness.

For the UFC, the next phase of transformative growth isn’t about squeezing more from its loyal base in North America; it’s about conquering new frontiers. There is no frontier larger or more promising than Asia, a continent with a deep, intrinsic cultural connection to martial arts. A continent where the UFC, for all its efforts, has never achieved the deep cultural resonance that ONE Championship has painstakingly built. Acquiring ONE would be a strategic shortcut, a way to instantly buy years of brand-building and market access.

This is what ONE offers the UFC.

What the UFC offers ONE is even simpler: survival.

TKO’s veteran sales team could secure more lucrative media and sponsorship deals for ONE’s content than it could ever achieve alone. It could strategically introduce paid tiers for content, converting passive viewers into paying customers. The UFC’s business acumen would be the engine that could finally turn ONE’s viral moments into actual dollars.

The UFC wouldn't just be buying a lesser MMA league. It would be acquiring the world's premier stand-up striking promotions in Muay Thai and kickboxing. This allows for a parallel brand strategy, similar to how TKO operates the UFC for real combat and the WWE for sports entertainment, each catering to different fan tastes.

This structure would also unlock the ultimate fan fantasy: cross-promotional superfights. "UFC vs. ONE" champion-versus-champion bouts would be global tentpole events, capable of generating immense hype and revenue. The logic is clean, powerful, and deeply compelling.

The Gauntlet of Reality

The vision of a unified combat sports empire is a powerful one. However, the path to its realization is blocked by a series of obstacles so formidable that they transform the dream into a strategic nightmare.

The Antitrust Wall

The single greatest hurdle is antitrust law. A UFC-ONE merger is a classic horizontal consolidation, a market leader buying its largest international competitor. This move would almost certainly be challenged and likely blocked by regulatory bodies in the United States.

The context for this is crucial: the UFC recently agreed to a landmark $375 million settlement to resolve a decade-long class-action lawsuit brought by fighters. A central pillar of that case was the accusation that the UFC built its monopoly precisely by acquiring its key rivals, most notably PRIDE Fighting Championships and Strikeforce.

To now attempt to purchase its largest remaining global competitor would be viewed by regulators as a brazen continuation of the very behavior it just paid a fortune to settle claims over. While TKO's lawyers would argue for a broad market definition of "global sports and entertainment," regulators would likely adopt a much narrower view: the "market for the promotion of premier global combat sports events." In that market, a combined UFC-ONE would hold a near-total monopoly.

The lawsuit has effectively created a "poison pill" for any such future acquisitions. The legal and reputational cost of fighting the inevitable antitrust challenges would be astronomical, making the entire premise of a full acquisition strategically unviable from the start.

The Ghost of PRIDE

Even if the deal could somehow navigate the legal labyrinth, the UFC’s own history provides a chilling cautionary tale. The 2007 acquisition of the legendary Japanese promotion PRIDE Fighting Championships, hailed as a sport-unifying triumph, quickly collapsed into what UFC CEO Dana White called "the worst deal ever done in the history of business."

The failure was a toxic cocktail of cultural and operational clashes. The UFC, owned at the time by the casino-magnate Fertitta brothers, required rigorous background checks to maintain their Nevada gaming licenses. PRIDE's former owners, plagued by credible reports of ties to organized crime, refused to comply.

Operationally, the UFC was unable to run the PRIDE brand in its home market, failing to secure a Japanese television deal or navigate the local business landscape. Just months after the acquisition, the PRIDE office in Japan was shut down.

All the UFC was left with was a fight library and a handful of fighter contracts. A merger with ONE Championship, a Singapore-based company with a distinct Pan-Asian identity, carries the same risks of cultural collision and the immense difficulty of a US-based company managing a uniquely Asian brand.

The Architects of Opposing Worlds

The incompatibility of the two promotions runs deeper than financials or logistics; it is baked into the DNA of the men who built them. Dana White and Chatri Sityodtong are not just CEOs; they are the spiritual architects of their respective universes, and their blueprints could not be more different.

Dana White, a former bellhop and boxing aerobics instructor from Boston, embodies the UFC's pugnacious, street-smart ethos. He and his childhood friends, the casino-magnate Fertitta brothers, bought the failing UFC in 2001 for a mere $2 million when it was a toxic brand barred from television. Through sheer force of will, relentless promotion, and a now-infamous abrasive style, White dragged cage fighting from the fringes into the mainstream. His journey was one of brutal pragmatism. He embraced conflict, encouraged rivalries, and understood that controversy sells pay-per-views. The UFC brand was forged in his image: raw, unapologetic, and, as its tagline boasts, "As Real As It Gets." It is a culture of commercial focus, where the spectacle of the fight is paramount.

Chatri Sityodtong’s story, which he frequently tells, is one of inspiration and resilience. A Thai-born, Harvard-educated entrepreneur, he frames his creation of ONE Championship not as a business venture, but as a mission to celebrate Asia’s greatest cultural treasure: martial arts. His narrative is one of overcoming poverty, adhering to the martial values of "integrity, humility, honor, and respect," and building a platform to "unleash real-life superheroes."

Where White built a business around conflict, Sityodtong built one around aspiration. ONE's marketing actively avoids trash talk, focusing instead on the inspirational backstories of its athletes. It is a brand designed to be uplifting, a stark contrast to the UFC’s raw authenticity.

These opposing origin stories have created two fundamentally irreconcilable corporate cultures. Attempting to fuse them would be like trying to merge the brand ethos of the National Football League with that of the Olympic Games.

This cultural divide leads to the final, practical deal-breaker: valuation. ONE’s investors have valued the company at over $1 billion based on a narrative of future growth potential. TKO, as a public company accountable to its shareholders, cannot justify an acquisition on narrative alone. Its valuation would be grounded in tangible financial metrics, and from that perspective, ONE is a company that has consistently lost vast sums of money. This would result in a valuation far lower than the billion-dollar-plus figure, creating a chasm that is likely impossible to bridge.

The Fantasy of a Savior

In the end, the billion-dollar dream of a merger is just that: a dream. The legal, cultural, and financial realities form an impassable wall. The UFC will not acquire ONE Championship. There is no white knight coming to solve the puzzle of ONE’s profitability.

For fans, this means the dream of champion-versus-champion superfights will likely remain a fantasy. For the sport, it means the landscape remains divided, with a clear hegemon in the West and a captivating, if financially troubled, powerhouse in the East.

And for ONE Championship, the promotion that captured the hearts of millions, it means it finds itself alone in the ring, facing its toughest opponent yet. This opponent is not another fighter.

It is the cold, unforgiving math of a business that does not reward passion alone. Its survival now depends not on finding a savior in its American rival, but on finally learning the brutal lessons of profitability that the UFC mastered long ago.

The clock is ticking.