The time for raising awareness about poor MMA pay is over, according to Paul. Now is the time for action.
Happy New Year everyone! It’s now 2023, and if Jake Paul is to be believed, this is the year that “The Problem Child” will fix the issue of poor MMA fighter pay.
Paul kicked off his 2022 by challenging UFC president Dana White to up the minimum amount of money being paid to new UFC fighters from $12,000 per fight to $50,000 per fight (amongst other demands). In his first new tweet of 2023, Jake dug that old message up and teased a change coming very soon.
“Happy 2023 to all MMA fighters & fans,” he wrote. “1yr ago today I started my mission to bring awareness & change to the sport’s pay & benefits. I’ve used my platform to consistently amplify this message. Now it’s time to not just amplify but to implement change. January is going to be [mind-blowing emoji].”
Happy 2023 to all MMA fighters & fans. 1yr ago today I started my mission to bring awareness & change to the sport’s pay & benefits.
I’ve used my platform to consistently amplify this message. Now it’s time to not just amplify but to implement change. January is going to be . https://t.co/ecbsrhrgyM
— Jake Paul (@jakepaul) January 1, 2023
Paul did spend a lot of time in 2022 trying to gin up support for an MMA fighter’s union / association that would be big and powerful enough to kick off a UFC fighter strike.
“We’re going to raise $50 million, and the fighters who are fighting check [to] check — we will fund them so they don’t have to be obedient to the UFC,” Paul said on an episode of his brother Logan’s YouTube show Impaulsive. “We will fund their salaries or their career earnings.”
“My ultimate goal is to create a fighter’s union,” Paul expanded on The Shop podcast. “It needs to be done. And it seems impossible and maybe it will be. People say ‘Jake, how you going to create a fighter union? They’ll just shelf all the fighters in the fighter’s union.’ No, everyone comes together and we’re not fighting. We’re not fighting. That’s how they do it. There’s writer’s guilds, director’s guilds.”
“I’ll call upon the 10 highest-paid boxers and the 10 highest-paid people from the UFC. ‘Yo why can’t you donate $200,000 to the union to help pay these fighters for these six months?’ Are you that selfish? Floyd Mayweather, Canelo, who make $50 million for a fight. Canelo, you can’t donate $200,000 to this union?”
“I’ll donate $500,000, I’ll donate $1 million,” Paul concluded. “I could raise more than that. The money that we put into the union can help pay the fighters who aren’t getting paid as much in the interim.”
During his recent October boxing bout against Anderson Silva, Paul made a bet with “The Spider” — if Jake beat the middleweight MMA GOAT in boxing, Silva would have to help him with the fighter’s union. Paul won their fight via unanimous decision with 77–74, 78–73, 78–73 scores.
Will anything come of Jake Paul’s plans to try and force the UFC to treat its fighters better financially? Battles like this typically don’t move very fast, but Paul implied in his January 1st, 2023 tweet that he’d blow our minds this month with some big news coming soon.
Well, let’s see it.