Turning obsession into reality: Inside the UFC's ambitious upcoming Sphere event

On Oct. 7, 2023, NFL legend Tom Brady was sitting cageside for a UFC Fight Night card headlined by veteran lightweight Bobby Green and rising prospect Grant Dawson at the UFC Apex facility, which has now housed over 100 events.

While the card, one of many on the UFC calendar, provided Green with a highlight reel finish early in the first round, it was what followed the event that would lead to perhaps the most unique event the promotion would ever plan.

Dana White set up shop for one of his trademark post-fight press conferences and when asked by longtime mixed martial arts journalist John Morgan why Brady was in attendance, White replied that they were heading to the U2 concert at The Sphere in Las Vegas, which had opened its doors for the first time eight days prior for a residency featuring the Irish rockers.

According to SACO Technologies, who designed and manufactured The Sphere’s signature LED technology, the venue boasts a fully programmable 580,000-foot LED display, the largest LED screen on earth.

The immersive experience spiraled into infatuation for White, who became fixated on hosting a UFC event at the venue.

“I’m obsessed,” White said at a press conference days later following the finale of the seventh season of the Contender Series. “I’ve been talking to MSG every day, the experience was amazing…It’s special, it’s incredible. I have been torturing them since I left on Saturday.”

SECURING THE VENUE

That obsession became reality following a situation with UFC and their partners at MGM that stemmed from the promotion’s inaugural Noche UFC event in 2023.

Billed as a celebration of Mexican culture in fight sports, Alexa Grasso retained her women’s flyweight title at the televised event and after its success, White declared that for as long as he was running the company, it would become an annual staple.

In 2017, it was announced that T-Mobile Arena would become the exclusive Las Vegas home of the UFC, which, at the time of the announcement, included a minimum of four events at the venue each year.

However, following the Noche UFC event, White says that MGM booked out T-Mobile Arena to Al Haymon’s Premier Boxing Champions, who are hosting Canelo Alvarez versus Edgar Berlanga on Sept. 14, without notifying the UFC of the booking.

White relayed a story of a subsequent meeting with MGM Resorts International President Bill Hornbuckle, who, in an attempt to mend fences, waived MGM’s exclusivity for the UFC to hold an event at the MSG Sphere.

Roughly one month after White’s experience at the venue, he announced that it was a done deal and the MSG Sphere would host the UFC’s Noche event in 2024.

“Remember that I said this to you tonight. I am going to put on the greatest live combat sports show anybody has ever seen,” White said following UFC 295 last November.

The event will be UFC 306, but formally titled Riyadh Season Noche UFC after the promotion secured a landmark partnership for the first event title sponsorship.

Securing the ability to book and utilize the venue was the first hurdle, but an even larger hurdle would be figuring out how to actually host the first live sporting event in a space that is more conducive to stage performances.

PRODUCING THE EVENT

Craig Borsari, who has been with the UFC for nearly twenty years and now serves as chief content officer and executive producer, was given the unenviable task of making this unique production into a reality.

“When you're in this industry, when you're into the production space, you kind of dream of these type of opportunities where you have an incredibly big production budget to go execute an event that's never been done before, where you have tremendous amount of creative input into the way this is going to be executed,” Borsari told Sportsnet. “A lot of excitement, but equal amounts of stress and pressure.”

LIGHTING THE OCTAGON

According to Borsari, lighting the Octagon was one of the biggest production hurdles given the unique nature of the venue.

“For 30 years, any time we've put on a live UFC event, we've had a lighting truss sit over the Octagon at 32 feet above the deck of the Octagon. If you were to do that inside The Sphere, you would have this massive visual obstruction from any seat that would be in front of their media plane,” Borsari explained. “Through several months of kind of lighting surveys and engineering explorations, we came up with a way to light our Octagon from behind the LED media plane. So we will blow light through the LED media plane at times to light up our Octagon to a level that's sufficient to broadcast our show. 

“(It) was one of those moments where, if we can't figure this out, I don't think it makes sense to even do a fight at The Sphere. Thankfully, we think we came up with a good plan to sort it out.”

DIRECTION

Another monumental task was determining how to strike a balance between the functionality of the venue’s massive LED capabilities and the fights themselves.

“One of our early guiding principles from the get-go was that we wanted the viewer at home watching the broadcast to feel like they had a seat inside The Sphere,” Borsari said. “So we have brought in a different, separate director to our fight director.”

Anthony Giordano has worked for the UFC as a live director for nearly 25 years and will be responsible for the direction of the in-cage action.

In addition to Giordano, Glenn Weiss joins the team for this event as the entertainment director. Weiss is a 14-time Emmy award-winning director and producer whose credits include the Academy Awards, Primetime Emmy Awards and Tony Awards. Weiss was also in the director’s chair for the famous incident when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on live television.

“Glenn will be directing cameras that really are designed to capture the entire media plane from different angles, different camera positions,” said Borsari. “That's going to allow us to make the event feel like you're experiencing something unique and not just a normal fight that's from any venue around the globe where we've put fights on in the past.”

STORYTELLING

The UFC’s production has been reliably consistent, with the event flowing seamlessly from one element into another. This event will have a different, grander feel to it with the intention of telling a story that celebrates the fighting culture of Mexico.

Mexican-American filmmaker Carlos López Estrada, who has directed music videos for artists that include Thundercat and Flying Lotus and most notably the Disney feature film Raya and the Last Dragon, was tasked with overseeing the production of six 90-second films that will run throughout the pay-per-view broadcast and serves as the main storytelling element.

“(Dana) said, ‘I want this to be a love letter to the Mexican people and their culture,’ and we had enough at that point to say, let's start to curate this narrative where we can celebrate the Mexican heritage and all of their rich history and tell that in a way where we can have our fights fit within this narrative,” Borsari said. “This whole notion of the Mexican fighting spirit is tied into our storytelling throughout the entire night.”

STRIKING A BALANCE

While the grandiosity of The Sphere will be the focal point of the event as a whole, one goal was to make sure that it would not distract from the in-cage action for both those in attendance and those viewing the broadcast.

During the fights, the aim is for the broadcast to look similar to other major UFC events and for the LED screens to not be a distraction to those in the crowd.

“We really wanted to calm the media plane and not be too active in terms of what's going on there,” Borsari said. “Although, it will still be active. There will be animations and a lot of details within the environment that is on the screen, but the focus will be on the fights at that particular time, and in between the fights it's all about the media plane and the content that we're putting up there. 

“So it's a little bit of a back and forth balancing act in terms of, when do we lean in towards our heavy storytelling techniques, where we're leaning heavily into the media plane, and then when are we going to be in a bit of a more traditional coverage of the way we would cover our fights?”

Borsari added that much of the way the LED screen would be utilized during the fight is similar to what a fan would experience inside of any other venue, with screens showing the in-cage action being built into cutouts within the digital environment.

ONE-AND-DONE?

With the UFC’s partnership with MGM and the level of both involvement and investment to operate such an enormous undertaking, White has stated on multiple occasions that the event at The Sphere will be a “one-and-done,” a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle that fight fans dare not miss.

Borsari isn’t so sure.

“You never know, right?” Borsari added. “I think we'll have a much better idea if we will ever attempt something like this again on Sept. 15. Dana's been saying that because of all of the unique aspects that have aligned to allow us to do this…The lead time to pull this off, it really monopolizes the time on our side with our production team. So, it's something that I think we can probably better answer after the event is done. We'll see how it goes.” 

Riyadh Season Noche UFC (or UFC 306: O’Malley vs. Dvalishvili) takes place Sept. 14 at The Sphere in Las Vegas.

Below is the current projected bout order for the 10-fight card:

MAIN CARD

-- Sean O’Malley vs. Merab Dvalishvili (for men’s bantamweight title)

-- Alexa Grasso vs. Valentina Shevchenko (for women’s flyweight title)

-- Brian Ortega vs. Diego Lopes

-- Daniel Zellhuber vs. Esteban Ribovics

-- Ronaldo Rodriguez vs. Ode' Osbourne

PRELIMINARY CARD

-- Manuel Torres vs. Ignacio Bahamondes

-- Irene Aldana vs. Norma Dumont

-- Yazmin Jáuregui vs. Ketlen Souza

-- Raul Rosas Jr. vs. Aoriqileng

-- Edgar Chairez vs. Josh Van