BKFC President David Feldman isn’t giving away too many details from a recent meeting with UFC CEO Dana White, but it appears he’s made a new friend in combat sports.
Following the conclusion of BKFC 57 on Friday night, Feldman addressed a recent photo posted that showed him standing alongside White after sitting down to chat. BKFC has been rapidly expanding in recent months, which includes sanctioning pushes in California and Nevada.
California has already approved bare-knuckle fighting in the state; BKFC recently announced KnuckleMania IV for Los Angeles on April 27.
“It was more of just creating an ally,” Feldman told MMA Fighting about the meeting with White. “That’s really all I have to say. It was great meeting, he’s a great guy. He’s doing his thing with UFC, and we’re going to do our thing with BKFC. We’re going to be the biggest combat sport on the planet.”
Feldman has often said he doesn’t really view the UFC as competition to his business because bare-knuckle fighting isn’t the same as MMA. Of course, BKFC remains one of the only major combat sports promotions regularly selling tickets to events, including over 8,000 sold in Utah when BKFC 56 landed there this past December.
As far as doing business with the UFC in the future, Feldman wasn’t opposed to the idea, especially if there was a chance for cross-promotion deals that could allow fighters from the UFC to compete in BKFC and vice versa. BKFC previously did that when Bellator MMA allowed Michael “Venom” Page to compete in a bare-knuckle fight against Mike Perry.
“We want to grow our sport,” Feldman said. “We want to make our sport the biggest it can be. If that means teaming up with other promotions, we have nothing against doing anything like that, because we think that it’s just going to make the sport grow and the company grow and the business grow. So anything that’s going to make it grow, we’re down for it.”
Feldman also revealed a recently meeting with RIZIN president Nobuyuki Sakakibara and welcomed dignitaries from Abu Dhabi to the BKFC 57 card on Friday. That all plays a part in BKFC’s plans for global expansion; the bare-knuckle show previously held events in loctions like Thailand and the U.K.
“We had people from all over the world in attendance tonight,” Feldman said. “They all loved it, and we’re going to expand everywhere.”