Report: UFC 228 estimated only as high as 130,000 pay-per-view buys

If UFC 227’s estimated pay-per-view buyrate of 300,000 was considered a pleasant surprise, UFC 228 is the exact opposite of that.

According to Dave Meltzer in his Wrestling Observer Newsletter, this month’s fight card in Dallas, Texas may not have cleared even 150,000 buys.

“The 9/8 PPV numbers were well below expectations with Woodley vs. Till on top. They are so bad that we haven’t gotten an estimate past an early number of 130,000 that was going around,” Meltzer wrote.

This would be on par with UFC 221 in terms of number of buys, and while we never got any solid information, UFC 224: Nunes vs. Pennington was rumored to have done less than 100,000.

It was pretty obvious that much of the promotional push was largely geared towards Till, but Till was completely dominated and submitted by Woodley in round two. Woodley himself has not been able to draw much interest among fight fans, but even this event would be his worst as a UFC PPV headliner.

The good news for the UFC, of course, is that Conor McGregor returns to the Octagon on October 6th against lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov. Another difficult pay-per-view year can easily be wiped out by UFC 229, which has a chance to do more than two million buys, as well as the possibility of Jon Jones returning against Alexander Gustafsson at UFC 232 in December.