By Fraser Stewart and Nathan Keenan
The Sphere hosted UFC 306 on Sunday morning (BST) in a sporting first for the Las Vegas futuristic event venue.
Marab Dvalishvili eased to victory in front of a sell-out crowd of 20,000 and a global audience of into the tens of millions.
The fight night broke box office record receipts for a single venue for the competition, generating around $22million.
It was the first sports event to be hosted by the new arena.
The event was headlined by Sean O’Malley and Marab Dvalishvili who had been catching mainstream attention in the build up all week. It was a dominating win though for Dvalishvili as he never allowed O’Malley to really open and get into the fight controlling from start to finish. Marab managed to win the fight by unanimous decision.
29 year-old O’Malley was the big star of the fight, losing only one of his competitive matches so far in his career. However, his opponent continued to be a dominating figure throughout the fight.
Marab got his first takedown in round 1 of the fight as a result of constantly changing the pace of the fight with O’Malley not knowing when to throw,.Marab in total was able to gain 1 minute and 20 seconds of control time which played on O’Malley as he was scared of the takedown and could not seem to get going.
This continued into round two where the Georgian was able to hold off O’Malley on the ground at 3 minutes and 12 seconds. All this put together was an easy win for the 33 year-old.
The gate receipt smashed the previous record from Conor McGregor’s and Eddie Alvarez’s clash back in 2017 which only managed to produce $17 million.
UFC President, Dana White went onto to talk about how well the production was caught on camera: “I was scared as to how the production would be caught on camera for the audience at home and by the looks of things very well.”
Despite the financial success for the franchise, there was criticism from fans who went paying nearly $3,000 for a ticket as well as between $100 and $450 for food and drink.
