Taylor Swift and the Super Bowl: Inside Dana White’s $30 million UFC 306 gamble at The Sphere in Las Vegas
The UFC is promising to put on the biggest event ever at Las Vegas’ state of the art Sphere. Here’s how they did it and why it’s costing Dana White 10 times more than any other pay-per-view.
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What do Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, Usher’s Super Bowl halftime performance, Frozen II and the UFC all have in common?
Well, nothing at all until this week’s history-making UFC 306 blockbuster at The Sphere in Las Vegas.
Also known as ‘Noche UFC’ in honour of Mexican Independence Day on September 16, the pay-per-view extravaganza in Las Vegas is the top secret, multimillion dollar brainchild of UFC president Dana White.
And it hasn’t come cheap.
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While the production of a regular UFC pay-per-view costs around (AU) $3 million, White estimates the one-off Noche UFC at The Sphere has blown out to nearly $30 million.
Included in that mind-boggling figure are producers and directors from Swift’s history-making Eras Tour and Usher’s Super Bowl halftime performance. There are also a few Hollywood and music industry heavy hitters with 29 Emmy wins, a Golden Globe and a Grammy between them.
Just days out from the event, the UFC’s Chief Content Officer and Executive Producer, Craig Borsari – who has spent countless sleepless nights bringing UFC 306 to life – gives this masthead a glimpse into what to expect this weekend.
“I’ve been with the UFC for 20 years and this is the biggest production project we’ve ever taken on by a magnitude of about 20,” he says. “When I realised Dana was actually serious about pulling this off, I took a beat and thought, ‘We need to go and find the absolute best in the business.
“And I truly believe we found that.”
Included in Borsari’s elite team are producers Baz Halpin, Mark Bracco and Linda Gierahn, who all played crucial roles in the Swift’s globe-trotting Eras Tour, which became the first tour to gross (US) $1 billion.
Meanwhile, coordinating producer Vincent Richards produced Usher’s Super Bowl halftime show in February and helped the UFC navigate the many hurdles around lighting the first ever sporting event at The Sphere.
UFC 306 will be headlined by two championship fights, with bantamweight titleholder Sean O’Malley defending against Merab Dvalishvili, and Mexico’s Alexa Grasso putting her flyweight title on the line against former champ Valentina Shevchenko.
White says the specifically selected members of the production crew all had the same reaction when discovering the size and scale of what he had planned: “You’re nuts. We’re in!”
In what has been hailed as the most intricate meeting of entertainment and sport in television production history, the UFC will also play short video segments honouring Mexican Independence.
That’s where Carlos Lopez Estrada (Frozen II and Encanto), and Valerie Bush, who worked on Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Sour Prom’ music video come in.
“We have six chapters that will run through the pay-per-view and Carlos and Valerie have been nothing short of extraordinary,” Borsari says. “We bought Germaine Franco (Encanto, Toy Story 3) in to handle the music composition and the original score for the films.
“From the very beginning, I’ve felt like my job has been like a general manager of a sports team, trying to get the best talent I possibly could.
“I feel if I’ve done anything right, it was getting the team right, and watching them all work their magic in The Sphere has been a real treat for me.”
Borsari has worked in many challenging environments, including during the pandemic and at stadium shows in Australia, but this dwarfs them all.
“We’ve done large scale productions in challenging and remote locations, and the approach is to try and execute the same show, the same look and the same feel,” he says. “It’s about keeping the product the same.
“This is anything but that. This is leaning into all of the unique aspects of the venue and actually drawing it into the broadcast.”
Taking what fans at The Sphere will experience, and translating it to the many millions watching around the world has also been crucial.
“We want to provide visuals to the viewer at home that allows them to feel as if they were in the venue,” he says. “That’s very difficult to replicate, but we have certain cameras, certain lenses and certain positioning of those cameras and we feel we can do what no one has ever done.
“We have spent a lot of time, money and effort to give the viewer at home an experience unlike anything they’ve ever seen.”
So, how about a sneak peek?
No chance.
Of the roughly 450 people working on the project, only a select handful of them have seen anything remotely close to the finished product.
Like the rest of us, everyone else will have to wait for showtime.
“We’ve set the bar incredibly high and really challenged ourselves,” Borsari says. “No one told us we had to reach a certain level, but our core ethos is just going out, and setting this wildly ambitious challenge.
“It’s becoming very real now in fight week and getting through our rehearsals, and now we just need to go out and execute.”
Originally published as Taylor Swift and the Super Bowl: Inside Dana White’s $30 million UFC 306 gamble at The Sphere in Las Vegas
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