“The UFC Has Stopped Creating Superstars.” So What Happens to the Sport?
It is 2019. Conor McGregor has not fought in over a year, has done nothing in the interim except get arrested, break an old man’s phone, and punch someone in a bar in Dublin — and yet the mere rumour that he might return to the octagon is enough to move the entire news cycle. Your buddy who has never watched a single combat sport is hyped for his return. He is on the back pages of papers that have never covered MMA, in conversations that have nothing to do with combat sports. He is, in the most complete sense of the phrase, a superstar — not just in combat sports, but in the broader culture where most people live.
Fast forward to 2026. The UFC keeps expanding, and Islam Makhachev is the best fighter on the planet — the number one pound-for-pound athlete in the promotion. He controls a fight with a technical mastery that borders on mauling his opponents, and the people who watch this sport closely talk about him the way fight fans talked about Floyd Mayweather at his peak. He just moved up a weight class and won the welterweight title. He is, by any objective measure, at the peak of the sport.
Now let’s ask someone who does not follow MMA if they know who Islam Makhachev is and you will get a blank look. This is the problem.
The UFC will tell you it is not a problem. Dana White frames it that way whenever the subject comes up, pointing to the Paramount deal, pointing to the numbers, pointing to the brand, pointing to the longevity of the brand. The brand is the star now. The UFC does not need a McGregor because the UFC is bigger than any one fighter. This is the argument, and it is only half true, which is exactly what makes it terrifying.
The brand argument works right up until the moment it does not. Yes, the UFC can sell cards on its own reputation. Yes, the Paramount deal represents real money and real reach. But the brand was built on individual stars who made non-fans care about individual fights. Ronda Rousey was on Ellen. She was hosting SportsCenter. She was the subject of profiles in magazines that had never run an MMA piece and have not run one since. People who had never watched a single fight bought the pay-per-view because they wanted to see what happened to her. McGregor was the same, only louder and more chaotic and somehow even more unavoidable. These were not just sports stars. They were cultural phenomena.
The current roster has no one like that. Which is not the same as saying the current roster is bad.
Ilia Topuria is genuinely fascinating — now a defeated two-division champion — fighting with a kind of furious clarity that is difficult to look away from. Khamzat Chimaev is the middleweight champion and one of the most terrifying athletes in the sport. These are real fighters with real followings within the MMA world. The ceiling on their mainstream appeal, though, is lower than it was for the stars who preceded them, partly because they are non-English-speaking champions in a promotion that has always needed an English-speaking face to break through to the American casual audience, and partly because the UFC has, over the last few years, quietly deprioritised the work of making stars in favour of simply running cards.
The star-making was not accidental during the McGregor and Rousey years. The UFC hired entertainment publicists. They got fighters onto late-night television. They ran athlete summits where McGregor was told to treat a press conference with the same seriousness as a training camp. It was an industrial process, and it worked, and at some point the organisation decided it no longer needed to run it.
What happens next probably goes one of three ways.
The first is that the UFC finds its next crossover star organically. Perhaps someone with the charisma and the results and the timing to break through the way McGregor did, and the organisation recognises it early enough to put the machine behind them. This is possible. It has happened before without being entirely planned. The ingredients exist in the roster, they are just waiting for the right combination of personality and moment. If that person emerges and the UFC responds correctly, the star problem solves itself.
The second is that the Paramount deal changes the game in ways that make the traditional definition of a superstar irrelevant. If the metric is no longer pay-per-view buys but streaming subscribers and engagement, then maybe Makhachev and Topuria are superstars by the new standard even if they are not household names by the old one. This is the argument the UFC is effectively making, and it might be right. Sports media has changed enough in the last five years that a fighter who drives a million Paramount subscribers might be worth more commercially than one who does one massive pay-per-view and then disappears.
The third version is the uncomfortable one. Boxing, which the UFC spent a decade treating as a dying sport, has spent the last two years putting on spectacles that generated more genuine cultural heat than anything the UFC has produced in the same period. Saudi money changed the economics. The fights have been enormous. The coverage has been inescapable. If combat sports fans with casual attention start defaulting to boxing as the place where the big moments happen, that is a slow leak the UFC has not historically had to worry about and has no obvious plan to address.
The honest assessment is that the UFC is fine right now and could be in trouble in five years. The brand is strong enough to absorb the current star vacuum. It is not strong enough to absorb it indefinitely. At some point the cards need faces attached to them that make people who do not already care want to tune in, and right now the promotion is running on the goodwill generated by fighters who are no longer fighting and an infrastructure that does not, on its own, produce the thing it was built to distribute.
The decision ahead is whether the UFC treats this as a structural issue worth solving or a narrative problem to be dismissed. Dismissing it wouldn’t be new — Dana White dismissed boxing’s resurgence too, and boxing hasn’t gone away. The fighters to build around exist. Topuria vs. Makhachev could be the kind of fight that cuts through, if it’s marketed with the aggression and creative reach of the old machine.
The question is whether anyone inside that organisation still knows how to run it.
