Mansplaining the UFC Debt Warning
UFC made headlines in the financial news world yesterday, and not in a good way. Bloomberg reported that the United States Federal Reserve admonished Goldman Sachs over WME-IMG's purchase of UFC. The story was circulated by the usual cadre of anti-UFC folks in the MMA world, but that doesn't mean that it's benign. Let's go through exactly how the UFC sale went down and what the Fed was complaining about. Some time ago, UFC's former owners, Zuffa, LLC (led by the Fertitta brothers) approached Goldman Sachs about brokering a sale. Approaching a bank about brokering a sale is standard operating procedure when the seller wants to go on the open market in order to attract debt-driven buyers. The idea is that Zuffa didn't want to limit themselves to selling to only people/companies who have billions of dollars of cash on hand. Zuffa wanted to be able to sell to people/companies to are willing to take on billions of dollars in debt, and then pay Zuffa with