We had a feeling this was going to be ugly, and we weren’t wrong. Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer reports that the last two UFC pay-per-view offerings – last month’s UFC 215 and last week’s UFC 216 – have done historically low sales numbers.
Meltzer estimates the UFC 215, headlined by UFC Women’s Bantamweight Champion Amanda Nunes successfully defending her title against Valentina Shevchenko, sold in the 100,000 ballpark. That would make it the lowest selling UFC PPV since UFC 53 (Andrei Arlovski vs Justin Eilers) sold 90,000 pay-per-views in 2005. In defense of UFC 215, it lost its original main event (Demetrious Johnson vs Ray Borg) due to illness, and a key main card matchup between Junior dos Santos and Francis Ngannou after JDS flunked a drug test. Still, it wasn’t expected to sell well even if those matches were on the card.
As for UFC 216, it did better, but not by much. Meltzer says it sold around 120,000 PPVs. This despite the card being headlined by two UFC title fights (as you can see on the poster above). This is the worst the UFC has done on back-to-back PPVs (sales-wise) since 2004-2005, when Tito Ortiz headlined UFC 50 and UFC 51 to the tune of 145,000 buys total.
For a full listing of sales totals for every UFC PPV in history, click here.
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