It’s fair to say that UFC CEO Dana White isn’t exactly quaking in his boots at the news that the MVP and PFL promotions are merging together to establish a new definitive No.2 organisation in the MMA landscape.

“I don’t know anything about what they’re doing,” White told Maclife this past weekend. “It probably makes sense. When sh*t isn’t working for anybody, we should probably get together. Let’s take two organizations that don’t sell tickets, and nobody watches and let’s merge them together and make a bigger company that we won’t sell tickets to and that nobody will watch.”

“Listen, I said this 100 times,” White continued. “I don’t look at any of those guys as our competition. We’re in a whole other f*cking stratosphere now. I mean, I’m competing with all the majors. Those guys aren’t my competition. So good luck to them all. I wish them all the best.”

Certainly the PFL promotion has never really troubled the UFC during it’s run, aside from picking up former UFC heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou a few years ago, which didn’t work out the way they might have hoped since he only fought for them once.

Meanwhile, MVP only entered the MMA scene very recently and certainly made an immediate impact by managing to get their Rousey vs. Carano event on Netflix, which delivered 17 million total viewers, though that was then eclipsed a month later by the UFC: White House event, watched by a total of 34 million viewers.

Still, with Jake Paul as co-owner and potential fighter on the roster, together with now having a deeper roster thanks to the PFL merger, MVP is going to be the most notable challenger the UFC has had for a while.

That being said, they’d need Netflix to get on-board permanently if they hope to make any real impact, and even with that the UFC already have what feels like an insurmountable lead, including a long history of swatting aside any competitors that dare to challenge them.