In a recent interview with ESPN, UFC president Dana White revealed that the reason Brock Lesnar chose not to return was due to receiving a better deal with WWE, and was in no way connected to the promotion’s new pay per view model. White claims that the UFC still pulls between five and seven million dollars a year on the old PPV structure, and denies the rumors that Lesnar asked for a flat-rate deal.

Completely not true. That’s absolutely false. And if you really look at when we were on pay per view, when we were on ‘traditional pay per view,’ everybody was talking about how the pay per view business is dying. It’s dying, and nobody can pull numbers anymore. Really? We were still pulling $5M to $7M pay per view buys a year when we were on the ‘dying traditional pay per view.’ You can’t listen to any of this noise. That’s not why Brock Lesnar didn’t fight. Brock Lesnar got a better deal is basically what happened for Brock.

Lesnar had been promoting a fight with heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier prior to his departure. Check out White’s full comments below.