The politics of the Octagon
What UFC's legalization battle teaches every league about winning in politics
Welcome to the Power Shifts newsletter. I’m Joseph Lavoie, a partner at Crestview, a global public affairs agency. Each week I share frameworks, playbooks, and case studies on designing effective public affairs strategies. I also explore my longstanding theory that every business is in the business of politics.
Free members can read a portion of each article, while paid members can read the whole thing. For some, part of the article satiates. But if you’re hungry for more, I’d love you to consider becoming a paid member!
You can also find my political analysis on the Craft Politics podcast.
I have been doing a lot of thinking, reading, and studying about the intersection of sports and politics. If you know me personally, you know I’m a football obsessive. I pretty much spend every minute of every evening and weekend at the soccer pitch, coaching, playing, or watching football. I harbour dreams of one day cracking the top 10,000 tier of FPL managers. Hell, I even dream of owning and operating a football club.
And yet, nearly two years into writing this newsletter, I’ve never explored an obvious corollary to my larger theory: if every business is in the business of politics, then every sport is too.
Starting this week, and in the coming weeks, I explore this concept further. If you love sports and politics, I think you’ll enjoy these. If not, stay tuned, I’ll be back with some new frameworks and concepts I’m fleshing out for an eventual book.
And yes, I’ll find an excuse to talk football soon enough. But to start, I look at Ultimate Fighting’s legalization campaign.
We’ll jump into our time travel machine and make our way to Albany, New York, on a cold winter morning in January 2016. We’ll pop onto the state capitol where we find UFC champion Chris Weidman, meeting with senators and assembly members, autograph in hand.
The glossy photo op has been designed to draw attention to something consequential: a decade-long political battle to legalize mixed martial arts in the the State of New York. This lobby day was the culmination of a sustained strategy that offers a blueprint for how—if you play your cards right—sports organizations can win government over. But it requires being willing and able to play those cards.
Because make no mistake: every pro team and every pro league is already playing politics. Few admit it. Fewer make the appropriate investment in keeping their skills sharp in the political arena.
It starts with basement brawls
To understand the UFC’s political journey, we have to go back further than 2016. We have to stretch back to 1983.
In Pennsylvania, legislators passed Senate Bill 632, dubbed the “Tough Guy Law,” which outlawed a “battle of the brawlers” style competition—i.e. mixed martial arts. This was the first explicit prohibition of an MMA-style contest in U.S. statute. The law defined as illegal any fight combining boxing, wrestling, kicking, choking, etc.
Why Pennsylvania? Because in the late 1970s, promoters Bill Viola and Frank Caliguri had launched CV Productions, staging early MMA-style “Tough Guy” contests throughout western Pennsylvania. These were marketed as “Anything Goes” fights.
And in March 1981, Ron Miller, a 23-year-old from Pennsylvania native, died from head injuries sustained in one of these fights. The death drew front-page headlines and intense public scrutiny, fuelling outrage over what many described as reckless, unsanctioned spectacles.
You can imagine what came next, right?
Grieving families, angry doctors, nervous officials—legislators felt the heat.
And instead of regulating narrowly, they swung a sledgehammer: ban it all.
Rather than narrowly regulating the Toughman contests, they broadened their response, conflating these risks with the emerging “Anything Goes” MMA—early precursors to what would later become the UFC. In a wave of public outcry and political brinksmanship, lawmakers moved to ban all such hybrid fighting outright.
Thus MMA’s legal identity was born under a law that didn’t name UFC—but boxed it in for decades. The state athletic commissions had jurisdiction over boxing and wrestling, but not yet MMA. When CV Productions pressed onward, they were met with injunctions, regulatory threats, and prosecution.
Which means that for years MMA existed in legal ambiguity—and in the shadows. UFC, which launched in 1993, inherited this ambiguity. From state to state, promoters faced bans, licensing hurdles, regulatory hostility, or outright prohibition.
And they faced John McCain.
John McCain mounts a campaign
John McCain was a vehement opponent of the sport. In 1996, after viewing an early UFC tape, McCain publicly described MMA as “human cockfighting,” expressing horror at the lack of rules and the brutality compared to traditional boxing or wrestling.
This is politics at work: one phrase from a senator reframed an entire sport for a decade. The term stuck in the public discourse, frequently cited by critics and used by media outlets as a shorthand for unsanctioned, violent combat sports. John McCain would eventually come around, but not before putting up his own fight.
He sent letters to the governors of all 50 states, urging them to ban MMA events. He recruited the American Medical Association to his cause, which joined the call for prohibition. Major cable television providers pulled UFC broadcasts from the air due to pressure. His campaign led several states to enact bans and forced promoters to either end or drastically change their events.
From the start, UFC events encountered legal and administrative barriers. If it wanted to go legal in these states, it would need to introduce more safety measures, rules, and standardized practices to gain regulatory approval and wider acceptance.
Which is exactly what the league did.
UFC begins to rewrite its rulebook
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, UFC leadership began rewriting its own rulebook to address safety concerns. Specifically, it:
Introduced weight classes to protect mismatched fighters
Mandated the use of gloves
Banned the most dangerous techniques (like headbutts and groin strikes)
Established timed rounds with referees trained to halt fights early.
UFC also agreed to submit to athletic commission oversight and drug testing.
These steps became known as the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts, adopted first in New Jersey in 2000, and gradually across other states. This regulatory scaffolding began to transform the UFC’s image from a lawless spectacle into a sport capable of winning political approval.
Of course, this political approval wouldn’t happen on its own. It takes consistent and tireless work to reshape the legislative and regulatory landscape.
A Patchwork of Barriers
By the early 2000s, MMA was legal in pockets of the country—but not everywhere. Even in states that permitted it, regulation was uneven or onerous.
One commission might follow New Jersey–style Unified Rules while a neighbouring state banned specific techniques, required steep promoter bonds and high per‑fighter medical insurance, or limited events to “exhibitions” under boxing codes. Some cities layered on their own moratoria, creating venue deserts even where the state allowed events.
Illinois, Massachusetts, Alabama, at one point all banned MMA outright. In some places, promoters needed to jump through athletic commission hoops, adopt a state’s “unified rules,” or secure special carve-outs. In many states, political resistance was tied less to empirical risk than to optics: no politician wanted to be painted as “supporting cage fighting.”
Which brings us to Albany in 2016. Despite UFC’s improved regulatory scaffolding, it was still not permitted to stage fights in New York, which is naturally, a big prize. It was the only major market in the U.S. that still forbade UFC events by 2016.
And then, four months after Chris Weidman showed up in Albany, New York became the 50th state to legalize regulated MMA.
The bill passed the Assembly 113–25, clearing committee after committee, before Gov. Cuomo signed it into law in April 2016.
That outcome was years in the making:
Repeated Assembly defeats
Intense lobbying campaigns
A calculated strategy to sway key committee chairs who had long bottled up the bill.
Dispatching fighters like Chris Weidman and Ronda Rousey to testify and meet with lawmakers
Mobilizing unions, tourism boards, and business groups to make the economic case
By 2016, the coalition was broad enough, and public attitudes had softened enough, that the measure sailed through the Assembly. The cold morning photo op we began with was the visible tip of a decade of political trench warfare. Legislators had repeatedly stalled earlier bills. Advocates had to reintroduce, re-lobby, reframe and make strategic choices.
Let’s take a look at those choices.
The UFC’s Strategic Turn
When Dana White and his team realized to be in the business of promoting fights they would need to be in the business of confronting the law, they began to treat public affairs and government relations as front-line strategy.
Reframe the narrative
The first step was to attack the misconception of the UFC as “street violence” or “human cockfighting.” It was a regulated athletic competition featuring disciplined, trained fighters subject to medical protocols, weight classes, commissions, referees, drug testing. As we touched on above, UFC pushed for adoption of “unified rules,” which integrated elements like rounds, judges, gloves, banned moves—to prove legitimacy.
They leaned on sports science and medical experts, positioning fighters as athletes who trained under strict safety protocols backed by formal rules and commission oversight.
This forced legislators to confront a basic question: do you treat this like boxing—or like street fighting? Outlawing street fighting is political easy. Outlawing a sport that shares many of the same safety protocols as boxing? Not as easy.
Sell the economics
The UFC also made the money case—and not in the abstract. New York officials publicly projected legalization would generate more than $137 million in annual economic activity and about $5.4 million in state and local taxes, with UFC events alone estimated at $32 million per year.
After legalization, UFC 205 at Madison Square Garden was studied to have produced $37.4 million in economic output and $18.3 million in salaries and wages. In fact Gov. Andrew Cuomo justified his support for the UFC as an “economic generator,” reinforcing that the pitch was rooted in modelled impacts, tourism, and tax receipts.
Yes, you always need a compelling emotive narrative, but that narrative will perform better when it is underpinned by validating data.
Political cover and incentives
UFC wasn’t shy about building political capital in three notable ways:
It backed pro-MMA candidates, taking an active posture in shaping who gets to shape the league’s regulatory environment. It provided political support to pro‑MMA lawmakers—via campaign contributions and public messaging that countered opposition narratives—making the economic and jobs stakes explicit .
And it went on the attack. If a legislator opposed MMA, they were implicitly favouring an antiquated restriction, or stoking cultural panic. By contrast, if they supported legalization, they could claim jobs, growth, expansion. This is the same argument it used to push back against union opposition to legalization.
It humanized the abstract. In New York, the push included deploying fighters as de facto witnesses (capitol lobby days and upstate tours with Chris Weidman), committee testimonies, and a coordinated media blitz.
Persistence and an always-on mindset
This was not a short-lived blitz or a quick one-off campaign. The organization’s lobbying began in December 2007 and dragged on—stalled, revived, reshaped—through multiple legislative cycles.
Experienced public affairs teams know that politics is rarely a quick knockout, it’s an exhausting grind. And that was certainly the case for UFC. Legalization wasn’t successful because of the lobby day we opened with above. It was the result of slowly changing the rules of the game, winning allies, and being prepared to grind it out over years, not days.
And this is why campaigns matter. They can shift legislative norms, reshape the stakeholder landscape, and turn lawmakers around. But it takes serious work and commitment. In my experience, too many organizations give up before the going gets tough.
The Turning Tide
New York’s resistance was stubborn, with multiple bills failing over the years. Even strong backing from governors and public support didn’t guarantee success until UFC’s lobbying, rhetorical strategy, and persistence aligned. Without question, the UFC’s public affairs investment is a core pillar in how it acquired and maintains regulatory power.
A recent study argues that UFC’s dominance in MMA is derived from institutional power built via weak regulation, limited political pushback, and central control over athlete contracts, acquisitions, and government influence. In that study, the authors identify four powers as core tools the UFC used to shape its regulatory environment:
Information power (controlling how the sport is framed)
Expert power (leveraging regulatory and medical legitimacy)
Reward power (political backing)
Coercive power (penalizing resistance)
Lessons for pro sports
If the UFC’s climb shows us anything, it’s this: politics and regulations can shape public legitimacy, which in turn shapes your growth potential. That’s because rules, access, legitimacy, and structural advantage are all mediated through political choices. To shape this conditions requires a persistent always-on mindset:
Governments decide what’s legal, what’s regulated, and what’s taxed.
Licenses, venue approvals, stadium permits are all political levers.
No sport survives without public trust, and trust often comes via law and regulation.
Those who master government affairs can erect barriers that keep challengers out.
Imagine an NFL team that never lobbied for stadium financing, or an NBA franchise that skipped engaging with city planners on zoning and bonds. They’d be stuck on the sidelines, the same way MMA was in its early years.
The UFC, in being committed to an always-on approach learned that politics can go from being a big blocker to a massive moat. Once every state legalized MMA, no rival could match its brand, infrastructure, or access.
That’s the deeper lesson for every professional league and franchise: your fiercest opponent is rarely on the field. It’s in the legislature, the regulator’s office, the city council chamber. Politics sets the rules of the game. The teams that recognize that—and invest in playing it well build regulatory power.