Late on Saturday night, Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, delivered an uncharacteristically measured assessment of the evening’s entertainment. The U.F.C. had finally staged U.F.C. 200, a landmark night of mixed martial arts, televised on pay-per-view, which the company had been hyping all year. “Tonight’s fights—y’know,” he said, not very enthusiastically. “We had some great fights, and there were some decent fights.” True, Miesha Tate, the bantamweight champion and one of the company’s biggest stars, had suffered a memorable upset to Amanda Nunes, who stunned her with a battery of punches and then choked her into submission; Tate lost both her championship belt and a good quantity of blood, which dripped from what remained of her nose. But there were relatively few thrilling moments; even White, known for expressions of pugnacious enthusiasm, had to admit that the night was a bit of a letdown.

U.F.C. 200 was meant to be the culmination of a weekend-long celebration of the U.F.C., and a chance for the company to show off: the U.F.C. also broadcast a night of fights on Thursday night, through its digital service, and another on Friday night, on Fox Sports 1. But it turned out that the biggest U.F.C. story of the weekend didn’t emerge until Sunday night, when KLAS, in Las Vegas, and the New York Times reported that the U.F.C. had been sold, for about four billion dollars, to a group of investors led by WME-IMG, the talent agency. White told ESPN that the news was very “bittersweet.” In addition to being the president—a job he will retain—White was also a part owner, with a reported nine-per-cent share in the U.F.C. This may help explain the message he sent, on Twitter, as the news broke: a smiley-face emoji.

The U.F.C. story begins with U.F.C. 1, a wild and grubby spectacle broadcast in 1993 to about ninety thousand pay-per-view customers, who were drawn by the promise that a wide range of fighters—boxers, kickboxers, jiu-jitsu specialists, even a hapless sumo wrestler—would compete in a cage to see which style worked best. (The winner was Royce Gracie, who was both a master of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and the younger brother of one of the organizers.) The sport soon developed a reputation for mayhem, and states started banning it. In 2001, the U.F.C. was sold to Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, a pair of Las Vegas casino owners who paid two million dollars, which wasn’t obviously a bargain. The Fertittas installed White, an M.M.A. fanatic who was working as a fighter manager, as president, and together they worked to restore the U.F.C.’s fortunes by redeeming the reputation of its sport, which was illegal in much of the country. They convinced the Nevada State Athletic Commission to allow matches, and as the U.F.C. prospered its owners grew more ambitious. In 2008, White told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “This will be bigger than the N.F.L. and bigger than soccer in the next eight years.”

This has not quite come to pass. (The U.F.C.’s four-billion-dollar sale price is impressive, but consider that, by some estimates, the Dallas Cowboys alone are worth about that much.) Still, the U.F.C. has made fitful progress toward the mainstream. A 2011 deal with Fox put U.F.C. fights on Fox Sports 1 and, occasionally, on the main Fox network, too. In 2014, the company signed a promotional deal with Reebok, which sounded impressive, although the initial implementation was remarkably inept. (A number of fighters complained that the new system, which made it impossible for them to advertise outside sponsors on their trunks, would cost them money; the official Reebok merchandise included typos and other embarrassing errors; a well-liked cutman claimed that he was fired by the U.F.C. for criticizing the Reebok deal, which the company tepidly denied.) And a few months ago, after a long political battle, the U.F.C. finally succeeded in persuading New York State, the final holdout, to legalize M.M.A.; the company announced that it would host its first New York City event on November 12th, at Madison Square Garden.

Because the U.F.C. dominates the sport of M.M.A., and because the company does not always wield its enormous power gently or wisely, fans of the sport often express their fandom by criticizing the company, and especially its ubiquitous president, White. Last month, one of the sport’s most prominent journalists, Ariel Helwani, was ejected from a U.F.C. event after reporting a story before the company could announce it; White told T.M.Z. that Helwani would never again receive a media credential “as long as I’m here.” (After sports-media outlets erupted in outrage, the company reinstated Helwani.) This approach to media relations seemed reminiscent of a certain Presidential candidate, and perhaps that candidate took note: on Monday, the Donald Trump campaign announced that it had hired Steven Cheung, who happens to be a former publicist for the U.F.C.

There is also the question of fighter pay: the astronomical sale price of the U.F.C. makes its announced salaries seem scandalously low. Saturday’s fight brought in $10.7 million in ticket sales, and a company executive predicted that it would be the U.F.C.’s biggest ever pay-per-view event, which would mean more than a million and a half buys, at a price of sixty dollars or so. And yet Tate, the defending champion, whose fight was the main event in the most heavily promoted U.F.C. show of all time, was paid an announced fee of half a million dollars: a big check, until you consider that Tate earned only ninety-six thousand dollars for her previous fight, and that she fights about twice a year, and that she is one of the most accomplished and recognizable athletes in a lucrative sport, and that this most recent payday was accompanied by a beating so comprehensive that it left Tate looking like the victim of a horrific car crash. U.F.C. executives have long maintained that athletes earn much more than their publicly disclosed purses, while declining to reveal details. As White once put it, “It’s none of your fuckin’ business how much these guys are making.”

What is inarguable, though—and laudable—is that the modern U.F.C. has endured and thrived, bringing order and stability to the previously chaotic world of mixed martial arts. Even White’s biggest detractors would probably agree that he is genuinely obsessed by the sport; unlike boxing promoters, who habitually protect their most valuable stars, the U.F.C. has generally found ways to give fans the fights they want, and one recent result has been a series of thrilling upsets, including the shocking knockout of Ronda Rousey, last year, and Nate Diaz’s chokehold victory over the Irish sensation Conor McGregor, in March. Part of the problem on Saturday night was that the fights were overshadowed by one that took place forty-eight hours earlier: Eddie Alvarez’s technical knockout of the fearsome Brazilian champion Rafael dos Anjos, on Thursday night. Part of the problem was that one scheduled headliner, McGregor, had seen his fight postponed after feuding with White over promotional appearances. And part of the problem was that another scheduled headliner, Jon Jones, tested positive for a banned substance and was removed from the event on Wednesday; his scheduled opponent, Daniel Cormier, was instead matched against an aging legend named Anderson Silva, in perhaps the night’s dullest fight. This last-minute chaos was in some measure the result of the U.F.C.’s ongoing effort to act like a serious, grown-up sports league.

There’s no way to know how much any of this will change in the years to come, as the U.F.C. ceases to be the private fiefdom of a bunch of fight fans and becomes the property of an entertainment conglomerate, along with a handful of investors. A more rational, more sober U.F.C. might be less likely to carry on vendettas with reporters, and it might inspire fighters to demand more transparency, or maybe even to organize. Perhaps White will be encouraged to engage more delicately—or simply less often—with the fans. Maybe fighters will be matched more cautiously, pressured to train more carefully, and encouraged to think of themselves as celebrities. (On Monday, White said that fighters would have more “television and movie opportunities” thanks to Ari Emanuel, the powerful co-C.E.O. of WME-IMG.) Maybe the new U.F.C. will be awesome. But now is not a bad time to remember that the old new U.F.C. was pretty awesome, too.