McLaren led group that tried to buy UFC this year

In the beginning, Rorion Gracie had a day at his Torrance, Calif. academy, where anyone game enough could test their skills by fighting Jiu-Jitsu exponents until someone quit. A student at the academy, Art Davie, was convinced that the challenge fights could turn into a Pay Per View event. The pair approached HBO, Showtime, and others, with no luck; then they presented to Semaphore Entertainment Group, and it was a go.

SEG, founded by Bob Meyrowitz, was the pay-per-view television arm of the massive international media company BMG. The head of programming at SEG was Campbell McLaren. Chief Operating Officer of the new UFC was David Isaacs, who had graduated from Harvard Law School two years before; Isaacs ran the company for the next half decade.

Thus it was that Art Davie, Rorion Gracie, David Isaacs, Campbell McLaren, and Bob Meyrowitz founded the UFC. 

Now in an exclusive with Submission Radio, McLaren reveals that he led a group of investors in a bid to buy the UFC earlier this year. And he does not believe the UFC has been sold.

I don’t think any of the reports are correct, by the way,” he said. “And I looked into potentially buying the UFC too with some very famous investment groups based in the US.

This was this year – and I think you guys are getting the scoop on this. I haven’t talked about this in the media, and investment bankers and private equity firms are notoriously press-shy, so I’m gonna avoid naming names – but we had what we thought was a tremendous offer, and it was 2.8 billion.

“That was sort of based on the investment bank arithmetic. The UFC did 200 million dollars in earnings before tax and depreciation, so last year they had a great year. They had Conor, they had Ronda. Great year. And they did 200 million dollars roughly in profit, so that’s tremendous. And typically, bankers, private equity firms might look at an earnings like that, and the range would be 12 to 14-times that would give you the value of the company – so 2.8 was on the higher side.

“But I think Lorenzo [Fertitta] is very forward-thinking and he says, look, I’m building this tremendous platform around the world and the UFC is a great in Australia, right? Great success in the US. We’re pretty good in Mexico. Great in Canada. Real traction in the UK. But yet, they have built out a platform in Asia and Europe and the Middle East that hasn’t really come online yet. So I think Lorenzo looks at this and goes, we haven’t even seen the real value of the UFC, so I want a lot of freakin’ money. I don’t want some banker’s idea of what it’s worth. I’m a visionary, I know this is worth a lot of money.

“So I do think he has a super-high value on it, but when you get to that point, there’s only a few people that really can enter into that sort of purchase. Investors are typically very disciplined. Sometimes very well-to-do individuals get caught up in the glamor of something and will overbid, and that’s kind of where I think they are. I don’t think the UFC has been sold. I don’t think it’s gonna be on UFC 200. Now they may have sold off a portion at a very high evaluation, but they can come back to it later on and say, ‘this is our evaluation.’