UFC 306 at The Sphere: MSG Entertainment’s Joel Fisher Goes Inside The Sphere’s First Live Sporting Event With Noche UFC

On Saturday night, a new era in live sports will dawn with the first ever live sporting event to be hosted at The Sphere in Las Vegas. UFC 306 at Riyadh Season Noche UFC is being dubbed as a “once-in-a-lifetime immersive sporting event” that will utilize Sphere’s next-gen tech to create an entirely different kind of live event experience. Following more than a year of planning and collaboration between the UFC and the venue’s owner, Madison Square Garden Entertainment, Saturday night’s event will finally bring the power of The Sphere to live sports. 

Dana White, who says the event cost $20 million to produce, calls UFC 306 at Riyadh Season Noche UFC a ‘love letter’ to Mexico and a tribute to the Mexican people for their contributions to combat sports. In celebration of Mexican Independence Day, UFC has created a series of films that will take over the 160,000 sq. ft. and 16K x 16K resolution interior display plane during the event. In addition to the world’s highest resolution LED display and  advanced concert-grade audio system, fans inside the Sphere will be able to genuinely feel the action thanks to the venue’s haptic seats, which provide force feedback based on the action in the Octagon. In addition, the Exosphere will be utilized throughout the night with key art and highlights to bring fans closer to the event, while in-house stats and information feeds will showcase real-time stats and fighter information integrated onto the interior display plane of Sphere. 

In anticipation of this historic production, SVG sat down with Joel Fisher, EVP, Marquee Events and Operations, Madison Square Garden Entertainment, to discuss how UFC came to be the first live sport to take place in The Sphere, his company’s collaborative relationship with White and the UFC, what fans can expect inside – and outside – the venue on Saturday night, the key differences between presenting a U2 concert experience and live sporting event at The Sphere, and what other sports he expects to welcome to the venue in the future. 

Can you tell me how the initial idea for this event came about?
We [at Madison Square Garden] have a long history as I think with the UFC, including helping them get sanctioned for the first event here in New York with UFC 205. We invited Dana to see U2 at The Sphere and he was absolutely blown away. He called me the next day to say UFC wanted to be the first live sporting event in The Sphere. That was the beginning of months of conversations and planning.

And once the event was finalized, what did the early planning stages look like?
We all agreed that if we were going to do this and do it right, we needed to plan well in advance and all have a unified vision of what this was going to look like. So about a year ago, I met with Craig Borsari [Chief Content Officer and Executive Producer] and Pete Dropick [EVP, Event Development & Operations] during a Top Rank boxing event here at the Garden and we worked closely together from that point forward to ensure that everything was perfect.

The sphere really was a vision directly from our chairman and CEO Jim Dolan. And he just really wanted to create this new medium that disrupted the traditional venue model and shook up an industry that hasn’t been innovated in a long time. So to be able to deliver the first live sporting event and broadcast it to the world – there will be as many as a billion people watching – is very exciting for both us and UFC.

Can you take me inside what the experience will look like for fans on Saturday night?
The experience starts before you’ve even entered [the venue] because we have the exosphere, which creates a one-of-a-kind visual experience. Then once you get into the building, fans will be able to explore and interact with immersive technology experiences in the Atrium. The UFC is taking over the entire atrium and decorating it around the theme of Mexican Independence Day. So the second you walk in, you’ll feel that you’re immersed in this special event, including a mariachi band and a variety of content on the different displays.

And we also have plenty of exciting moment leading up to the fight. On Thursday, we are doing the press conference right outside in one of our parking lots with The Sphere as the background. On Friday, they will do the weigh-in outside in front of the sphere with UFC creative on the exosphere. And UFC is also doing a fan fest starting on Friday that runs through the pre-fight preparations on Saturday.

On fight night, fans are going to experience something that’s literally never been seen before in sports. We’ve worked with UFC on these six films that will be [displayed] on our incredible 16K media plane These interstitials will be seen throughout the night between the fights and will provide a tribute to Mexico and their history and fighting in MMA. So it should be really incredible. I’ve been fortunate to see a lot of the storyboards and content that they’re presenting and it’s going to be a genuine spectacle.

Then we also have an audio system that is unlike anything else you’ve ever heard, as well as haptic seats so that [fans] will actually feel it when somebody gets hit or hits the canvas. People inside the building are going to get this overall experience that you simply cannot match in a regular venue.

What are the major differences between presenting a live concert or entertainment event at The Sphere and producing a live sporting event? What are the primary factors you have to consider?
I have to go back to Jim’s original vision. He recognized that people increasingly really wanted a ‘we’ experience that could be shared. It’s more powerful when you bring all of these people together. So he had the vision of harnessing the power of all this cutting-edge technology to ignite all the senses and transport audiences to both places real and imagined.

When you think of a sporting event at a regular arena, you’re coming and you’re watching the sporting event and that’s it. This is so different because it’s a combination of entertainment as well as the sporting event itself. And it’s harnessing the enormous power of technology and you’re just creating this transformative environment where communities come together. And so I think in a lot of ways this will revolutionize the live experience because you’re coming and you’re watching the fights, but you’re also being entertained by what the UFC has created.

Can you provide any more detail on how that massive LED media plane will be utilized during the event?
It’s a great question and UFC has obviously planned for that with us. So when they’re running these interstitials on the media plane, there will also be picture-in-picture screens so that you can see the fighters enter the arena and what’s happening in the octagon. In addition to that, they will also be showing stats and facts about the fighters. So while UFC is using the media plane for the interstitial movies – or worlds as they call them – that they have created, they can also use the media plane to show the fights, statistics, and other elements that build this story around Mexico and the fighters themselves.

Once Saturday’s event is finished, what can we expect next from The Sphere in terms of live sports events?
Well, I think that we already learned a lot from the NHL Draft, which pretty much everybody thought was great and translated incredibly well to the broadcast TV. With this being the first live sporting event, I think we will learn a lot more about how this all translates to being broadcast live to the world.

We want to do a lot of these types of events and I know that esports, wrestling, boxing have come up as some good opportunities. We’ve also been approached about doing tennis, which could be very interesting. It’s obviously not a basketball or hockey arena, but there are a lot of opportunities that we see to host live sports at The Sphere.

We also want to do watch parties. We were partners with the NFL when they had the Super Bowl in Las Vegas last year, where we partnered to show a lot of content on the exosphere. We want to continue to develop the technology so we can actually use The Sphere for watch parties for big time events like the World Cup and Super Bowl. We’ve been speaking to all kinds of different leagues and organizations about doing that.

What do you hope to learn from this weekend that you can apply to future live sporting events at The Sphere?
I think this is where the world is going in terms of live sports and entertainment. Jim was way ahead of the curve and I think this event will prove it. Dana, to his credit, really wanted to be the first sporting event in The Sphere, and it should be an incredible experience. And again, it’s not just the fights that you’re going to see, it’s the entire experience. I think we’ll learn a lot from just seeing what Dana and the UFC has done for this event. This is going to be a spectacular event and I know that everyone in our organization is extremely excited to see it come to life.

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