Given their recent partnership under the TKO Group Holdings banner, professional wrestling outfit WWE has come under fire for promoting August’s flagship UFC 319 card in Illinois today.
World Wrestling Entertainment, headed up by chief executive Nick Khan and former professional wrestler Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque, is under the umbrella of the TKO Group Holdings — with the parent company also fielding the Dana White-led UFC in their impressive portfolio.
But in the year since their partnering, altering worlds between the two companies have been few and far between — beyond a host of fighters taking in the action at WrestleMania 41 earlier this year in Las Vegas.
Seemingly streamlining their promotional duties ahead of this summer’s Octagon return to Chicago, the WWE group came under fire on social media this evening, however.
With Dricus du Plessis set to defend his middleweight crown against the unbeaten Khamzat Chimaev at UFC 319, the WWE has rather bizarrely promoted the event. Posting a link to the ticketing outlet, Tickermaster for the flagship card, the wrestling promotion even shared a presale code for avid fans of mixed martial arts.
“UFC tickets on sale now with presale code: UFCWWE,” the wrestling promotion posted on their official X account this evening.
However, it doesn’t seem fans from either side really want the collaboration to hold. “I honestly don’t care,” said a Twitter user beneath the post.
Furthermore, a second user even went as far as to question if the WWE’s official page on the site had been subject to a security breach. “WTH is happening, was this page hacked?” they wrote.
Wth is happening was this paged hacked
— CN (@Chinonxo_) June 19, 2025
A third commenter — sporting a Shavkat Rakhmonov AVI– questioned why the WWE would go and promote the UFC 319 pay-per-view card, writing, “Why are they mixing fake fighting and real fighting?”
Interestingly, this is not the first time the Chechen has been mentioned in the same breath as the WWE.
Chimaev infamously called out Brock Lesnar
Riding a stunning run of fourteen straight career wins spanning the entirety of his stint in mixed martial arts, Chimaev will finally fight for gold this summer against South African star, du Plessis.
Fresh from a dominant win over former champion Robert Whittaker via submission in October, Chimaev had enjoyed another prior infamous win in the Middle East.
Back in 2021, the former AllStars MMA staple defeated Li Jingliang with a stunning first-round rear-naked choke win in Abu Dhabi. And often hyped and vocal throughout his fights, the unbeaten middleweight star then urged bossman White to book him opposite WWE superstar, and former UFC heavyweight champion, Brock Lesnar.
“He (Khamzat Chimaev) was yelling crazy s*** at me the whole fight,” White said after the event. “I don’t know why, but he was basically just saying, ‘I’m going to fight everybody. I’ll fight Brock Lesnar. I don’t care who it is.’ You know, he was just yelling stuff like that.”
Notably, Lesnar left the promotion in disgrace in 2016, after testing positive for a banned substance in his return fight against Mark Hunt, leading to an overturned win in his UFC 200 comeback.
