DANA White is in charge of a company that was sold for more than $AU5.8 billion, but money doesn’t solve everything.

The UFC president is responsible for putting the biggest names on the biggest stages to draw the biggest crowds. His job is to provide entertainment. Only by entertaining can he — and the UFC — make money.

However, sometimes the biggest names aren’t always available. Mixed martial arts is a vicious sport and injuries are commonplace, but it’s when fighters pull out of bouts because they’ve hurt themselves training — rather than during a fight night — that White gets angry.

Luke Rockhold hasn’t fought since losing his middleweight crown to Michael Bisping midway through last year and is currently recovering from a knee injury. Light heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier pulled out of a title fight against Anthony Johnson in 2016 after tearing his abductor tendon and Cain Velasquez couldn’t fight at UFC 207 due to a back problem.

One common trait these fighters share is they all train at the American Kickboxing Academy (AKA) in California, and in a recent interview with Sports Illustrated, White didn’t miss the gym when discussing whether there were problems with “improper training” in the UFC.

“Some of the gyms we did (address the problem). With others it’s as bad as ever,” White said. “Listen, guys at AKA get injured every single fight. Luke Rockhold is out. Khabib (Nurmagomedov) got hurt there training. Then you have Cain Velasquez. The champ, Daniel Cormier is hurt.

“I don’t know (what the UFC can do), man. We started doing these seminars and stuff. They’re receptive to it. But I don’t know. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, man. Staggering numbers.”

Daniel Cormier (R). Source: Getty Images

Luke Rockhold. Source: AFP

Fighters pulling out of scheduled appearances in the Octagon is a problem for White and the UFC because it ultimately costs them money. The promotion aims to stack fight cards with quality match-ups rather than pit ordinary fighters against each other on the undercard before a blockbuster main event. It’s what separates the sport from boxing.

“From the get-go, our goal was to do the exact opposite of what boxing had done,” White said. “We stacked cards. You can never be in the situation where you take one fight — I blame a lot of the guys for this, not just the promoters, but the fighters, too. You say a De La Hoya-Mayweather (boxing) fight, they make all the money, then there’s nobody on the undercard, right?

“What I’m selling you every Saturday night, they’re ‘Holy s***’ moments, where you jump off the couch with your friends, look at each other and go, ‘Holy s***, that just happened.’ Everybody is going crazy.

“We put great fights on all the cards so you could have those moments.”

But not everyone enjoys those “Holy s***” moments. Actress Meryl Streep took a shot at MMA during her speech at this year’s Golden Globes when making her feelings on the American political climate known.

UFC president Dana White. Source: Getty Images

“Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. If you kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts,” Streep said.

White responded earlier this year, calling Streep an “uppity 80-year-old lady”, but suggested to Sports Illustrated the actress had an ulterior motive.

“I don’t expect an older lady of her age to be in the demographic — not that she couldn’t be — and you know what I learned?” White said. “It wasn’t a dig at the sport. It was a dig at Ari Emanuel, who was there. She’s with another (management) agency. That was a dig at Ari Emanuel.”

Emanuel is a talent agent and co-CEO of WME — the company that bought the UFC last year — and White clearly thinks there’s some bad blood between he and Streep.