UFC sell-out 32,000 tickets
This month the UFC will return to staging events in front of widescale live attendance starting with UFC 261 on April 24th at the VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, Florida.
This event sold out 15,000 tickets within minutes and became one of the fastest selling UFC events ever and even broke arena records as being the highest gate in the venue’s history.
The VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena was also the first venue to host UFC events in the United States in the aftermath of the initial wave of the Covid-19 pandemic halting sports. The promotion staged three events within a week at the venue last May before switching to the Apex facility in Las Vegas and ‘Fight Island’ in Abu Dhabi.
Headlining UFC 261 will be a huge welterweight title rematch between champion Kamaru Usman and popular star Jorge Masvidal. There will also be two female title fights taking place as strawweight champion Zhang Weili faces Rose Namajunas and flyweight champion Valentina Shevchenko meets Jéssica Andrade.
UFC President Dana White tweeted his excitement of the success of UFC 261:
If that wasn’t enough. Over the weekend White then revealed that UFC 262 had also quickly sold out. This event is scheduled for May 15th at the Toyota Center in Houston, Texas and will mark the biggest attended MMA event since February 2020 - which was UFC 247, also at the Toyota Center.
Michael Chandler and Charles Oliveira will battle for the vacant UFC lightweight title in the main event while we will see the return of Nate Diaz in the co-main event against the UK’s Leon Edwards.
UFC 261 & 262 won’t be the first UFC events with a live attendance since the Covid-19 pandemic struck the world. In January this year the promotion held three events at the Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi with a limited attendance numbers of 2,600.
