If you needed one snapshot to capture where Dana White’s head is at right now, consider this: sometime in the hour before the UFC Belgrade press conference, he opened his phone, found MMA content had appeared in his feed, and blocked it out. Multiple times.
White confirmed as much when a reporter asked him directly about his personal social media algorithm. The question was simple enough: what actually fills his feed?
“I just had to block three other f***ing MMA things so that we keep the MMA out of my algorithm,” White said. “Cause like, maybe an hour ago, I’m like, why is this s**t popping up in my feed? And I had to block three, three MMA sites.”
The follow-up was equally straightforward: if not MMA, then what? White answered without hesitation.
“There’s a lot of crazy s**t, but it’s not MMA,” he said. “I don’t have any… I got like street figh ting and s**t like that in there, but no professional organized figh ting in my feed.”
As for his actual digital diet: “Mine’s hair transplants, and women for the most part.”
Coming from the president of the world’s largest MMA organization, that might have been the strangest thing said all week. Then came the press conference itself.
A reporter directed a question at White asking which bouts on the Belgrade card he was most looking forward to. It is the kind of question that gives a promoter an easy moment to spotlight his own event. White wanted no part of it.
“That is a sh**ty question, my friend,” he said, and moved on to something considerably vaguer: “Listen, obviously everybody’s always excited about the main event. I’m just hoping, I want a few holy s**t moments on Saturday night, so hopefully we get a few of those.”
He named zero athletes. Zero matchups.
On a card headlined by Jairzinho Rozenstruik vs. Daniel Rodriguez, featuring Serbian fan favorite Aleksandar Rakić competing in front of a home crowd for the first time, alongside former champion Petr Yan, Milos Janicic, Vlasto Čepo, and Dushko Todorovic, there was no shortage of material to draw from. He reached for none of it.
Ben Fowlkes, a veteran MMA reporter, noted the particular awkwardness in the situation. Reporters who ask the UFC about anything beyond the matchups are routinely redirected and told to “talk about the fig hts,” which makes getting dismissed for asking exactly that a strange experience.
Ariel Helwani put the central question plainly: was White deliberately brushing off the reporter, or did he simply not know the card well enough to answer?
