UFC 306 event at Las Vegas Sphere records highest gross revenue for UFC and venue at $22M 

The first sports event to be held at the Las Vegas Sphere, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) 306, recorded the highest gross revenue for both the venue and UFC as Saturday night’s 10-fight showcase pulled in $22 million in sales.

UFC 306 featured a bantamweight title fight in which defending champion Sean O’Malley was defeated by Merab Dvalishvili. The UFC night was the first sporting event held at the Sphere, which opened a little less than a year ago.

The showcase sold out the 16,024 tickets made available, reports Sportico. UFC also noted the organization saw the largest merchandise sale in its history.

“Literally the whole thing was seamless,” said UFC president Dana White in a post-event press conference. “It was perfect. We didn’t have a lot of time to rehearse – that was our big worry coming in here – but they nailed it.”

For the Sphere, the event was the debut of the final leg of its three-part strategy for regularly filling the arena. The venue has previously hosted several concerts as well as corporate events, with Hewlett-Packard being the first to hold a corporate keynote presentation there earlier this year. The NHL draft was also held at the Sphere. 

White noted that the 450 people who worked on the production of the event "absolutely nailed it," and among those praising the show on X afterward was Elon Musk, calling the Sphere a "work of art."

Among the high-profile attendees was Amazon's Jeff Bezos who was at the event with his fiancee Lauren Sanchez, at a time when UFC is about to begin media rights talks for its next cycle.

While it has not been disclosed how the $22 million revenue is split between Sphere and UFC, it likely provided Sphere with a better-than-average haul: last quarter the company averaged about $700,000 per event, including theatrical presentations shown during the day.

For UFC, the gross revenue exceeds the record set by UFC 205, which featured Conor McGregor in the main event at Madison Square Garden. That 2016 event pulled in $17.7 million gross. Still, UFC spent $20 million on developing and staging the show, White told Sportico.

White said UFC used all the capabilities of the Sphere for the event including haptic seats and adding ring lighting in gaps in the Sphere’s wall of video screens to replace the lighting rig usually suspended over the ring. “The whole arena game is starting to go to another level,” White said.