The biggest acquisition in sports history, WME/IMG’s $4 billion-plus purchase of the UFC, was announced on July 11 with a 950-word press release.

There was no news conference. There was no conference call. There was no explanation of the new owners’ vision for the world’s leading mixed martial arts promotion, nor any discussion of its plans for its shiny, new property.

Dana White was staying on as president, the news release announced, but White himself was reluctant to discuss the new deal. He texted with several reporters on July 10, the night the news of the sale came out, but has largely refrained from speaking about the sale since.

Even upon the sale’s Aug. 18 closing, White steadfastly refused to discuss WME’s plans.

White has largely avoided the media over the last several months. He’s routinely begun to skip post-fight news conferences and grants only a fraction of the interviews he once did. A Yahoo request for an interview with Ari Emanuel, the co-CEO of WME, was denied.

Last week, the UFC announced widespread layoffs, in which it cut what it said was about 15 percent of the workforce. Some of its most significant employees, including Garry Cook, its chief global brand officer, and Marshall Zelaznik, its chief content officer, were among the approximately 75 let go.

Employees were summoned to meetings with executives, told of their dismissals and then escorted by security to their cars.

In addition, other key executives, including matchmaker Joe Silva and Dave Sholler, the vice president of public relations, left the company on their own. Silva is retiring and Sholler accepted a position with the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers.

On top of that, the company is in a public feud with elite fighters like Georges St-Pierre and Jose Aldo, while others have angrily demanded more money given the astronomical sale price.

The changes and the new ownership’s public silence on anything related to the UFC led to rampant speculation about whether the company fans had grown to love over the last 15 years would ever be the same.

Lawrence Epstein, the UFC’s chief operating officer and a holdover from the Lorenzo Fertitta Era, insisted to Yahoo Sports that WME has big plans for its new acquisition and that its impact will soon be felt.

Fertitta told employees in his last meeting with them before leaving that he agreed to sell to WME because he believed the new ownership could take the UFC to the next level.

Epstein, in the first extensive on-the-record public comments from a UFC executive since the sale, echoed that sentiment during a lengthy interview with Yahoo Sports.

“This is definitely a new chapter in the history of the UFC and I can say that I think it will be our best and brightest chapter,” he said.

He addressed the layoffs as the reality of such a large deal when a bigger company like WME acquires a smaller one such as the UFC. There were job redundancies and the personnel changes were made to reduce those and best take advantage of the strengths of each company’s staff.

“I really need to emphasize that the personnel changes had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the performance of those individuals who are no longer with us,” Epstein said. “What we essentially did when the deal closed is we laid out all the assets and the areas of expertise we added to the company and overlaid it to what we had.”

WME, Epstein pointed out, has 6,000 employees in more than 50 offices around the world.

“They represent virtually every single sports brand in the business at some level in addition to representing athletes and actors, producers [and] writers at all levels of the entertainment industry,” Epstein said. “And we took a look at what we had and what they had and, as I said, there was some overlap there. That’s what resulted in our personnel changes.”

The loss of the laid-off employees, as well as those like Silva, presented the question about the impact it would have on the product. These are the people who helped build the UFC into a global power that thrust it into the forefront of mainstream sports.

Silva, for instance, had highly specific knowledge of mixed martial arts that led in many ways of the development to the modern UFC. There are only a handful of people in the world with his understanding of fighting and how best to put the various styles together to produce a great event.

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