White confirms Fight Island will take place on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi

Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC

Dana White confirms that UFC Fight Island will take place in Abu Dhabi.

The initial reports were true.

The mysterious UFC Fight Island is located on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi, per a recent interview with Dana White.

“It’s Yas Island, in Abu Dhabi,” the UFC president confirmed on Tuesday. “When this whole thing went down [coronavirus pandemic], I was trying to figure out how to do events so I started talking to different places, and Abu Dhabi was open to it.”

White went on to state that fighters will eat, sleep, and train on the island and that — yes — fights will take place on the beach.

“It’s big,” White said of Fight Island. “Everything will happen on the island. Nobody will leave the island. They’re gonna have their own private training quarters where people can train themselves, we really do have an Octagon out on the sand. The infrastructure’s gonna be unbelievable.”

The first ever UFC event on Fight Island will be UFC 251, which will take place on July 11 and feature a trio of title fights on the main card.

Kamaru Usman will defend his welterweight title against Gilbert Burns in the main event, and Alexander Volkanovski will put his featherweight strap up for grabs against ex-champ Max Holloway in the co-main event. As if that wasn’t enough, Jose Aldo and Petr Yan will square off for the vacant bantamweight title in the first championship bout of the night.

The pay-per-view extravaganza will also feature a rematch between strawweights Jessica Andrade and Rose Namajunas as well as an exciting matchup between Paige VanZant and Amanda Ribas.