Dana White makes suspicious claims about Power Slap league

Love him or hate him, few would argue UFC president Dana White is one of the top promoters in professional sports.

However, many are accusing White of flat out lying to reporters after he made some bold (and skeptical) claims about another company he spearheads — Power Slap.

Licensed by the Nevada State Athletic Commission, Power Slap is a slap fighting league where participants compete by delivering open-handed slaps to their opponent. Bouts are scheduled for three rounds and scored using a 10-point system similar to the UFC or boxing.

While the sport has been heavily criticized for being unsafe, White stated at UFC 288 over the weekend that the sport is actually rising in popularity and has become quite a lucrative business.

“Not only has it been unbelievable money wise, it’s been unbelievable as far as social media goes,” White said, via MMA Fighting. “We’re No. 1 in all of sports, and when I say all of sports, if you take the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, F1, WWE … and added them all together, their numbers don’t compare to Slap’s.”

While Power Slap’s popularity has increased after a turbulent debut earlier this year, White’s claims are simply difficult to believe. 

The league has a combined 4.143M followers across the four major social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok). For comparison, the NBA has 182.8M combined followers, WWE has 106.4M, the NFL has 88.8M, MLB has 34.5M and the NHL has 19.8M.

The most popular tweet from Power Slap’s official Twitter account over the last two months reached an audience of 680,100 people with 1,400 likes and under 350 retweets. 

The NBA and NFL had multiple tweets reach audiences of over 1M people on Monday alone, and the WWE had several tweets reach over 1M people during its pay-per-view event on Saturday, including one with 9.3M views.