The UFC is maintaining that ticket sales for Saturday’s UFC Perth event are just fine.
A report from local news outlet 7News Australia said that ticket sales are low, that the RAC Arena is “only about half
full, and tickets are now being discounted.” During the UFC Perth press conference, Senior Vice President for International Operations Dave Shaw was asked about the reports.
“There is not an issue for this event,” Shaw said.
According to TicketTek, the company being used to sell and distribute tickets for the event, while the event is certainly not a sell out currently, there are more tickets sold than the report indicates. As of now, available tickets range for between $75 and $100, and the event is headlined by a pivotal light heavyweight matchup between surging contender Carlos Ulberg and past two-time title challenger Dominick Reyes.
Shaw maintains that the UFC continues to thrive in Australia, and they have been building things up since they made their first appearance 15 years ago.
“Listen, from the very beginning, we’ve taken the long run, playing the long game with Australia,” Shaw said. “We mentioned being first here in 2010 with UFC 110. We opened up the office, playing the long game in 2014… and then in 2015 when we held the biggest event in UFC history with Ronda [Rousey] and Holly [Holm] in Melbourne. We overturned the ban of the octagon in [Western Australia] in 2017, we had a Fight of the Year in 2023 with your boy [Alexander Volkanovski] and Islam [Makhachev].
“We will continue to take the long run in Australia. We know you guys are a sports-mad country, and for us, you often hear Dana talking about how MMA is going to be the biggest sport in the world, and our viewpoint on Australia as one of the top markets we go to every year is that this is going to be a massive sport in this country. And this is also a pretty special card. I mean, think about us having more regional athletes, more Australian, more Kiwi athletes on this card than we’ve ever had in the past.”
