Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney
Things have started to heat up over the last few days for lightweight fighter Eddie ‘The Silent Assassin’ Alvarez as he now faces a legal challenge from the Bellator promotion over the latest contract proposal.
On Monday, Alvarez came out saying that the Bellator promotion failed to match the contract offered him by the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and that now he is being sued by Bellator over the contract dispute.
Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney spoke out about the situation on Monday to MMAFighting.com, defending his company’s side of the contract negotiations stating the offer made to Alvarez was the exact same as the UFC’s.
“I will tell you point blank, no questions asked, we matched it dollar for dollar, term for term and section for section,” he said. “To avoid any kind of ambiguity, let me make clear, we took the UFC contract, we took it out of the PDF format, we changed the name ‘UFC’ to ‘Bellator’ and we signed it. We didn’t alter a word, we didn’t alter a phrase, we didn’t alter a section, we didn’t alter a dollar figure.”
Naturally the sticking point is a cut of the pay-per-view revenue, which the UFC is certainly offering Alvarez for all events he would participate in. This is a practice the UFC appears to follow when dealing with it’s big starts, it’s just not a business model that Bellator Fighting Championships follows as their events air on free television.
Projecting a dollar amount generated from ppv buys is certainly an unknown and according to Rebney is something his company doesn’t “have to match.”
“There is no guaranteed pay-per-view in the UFC offer to Eddie Alvarez,” he says emphatically. “We as Bellator don’t have to match projections. We don’t have to match what could conceptually happen. We have to match guaranteed dollars and what the UFC contractually guaranteed would occur. That is what we are held to.”
I can certainly understand Bellator’s stance, it’s difficult to quantify something for which there has been no basis for when it comes to Alvarez. I guess one could use the PPV numbers from UFC 149, the Octagon debut of former Bellator champ Hector Lombard, but again how does one compare the drawing power of Alvarez to Lombard.
On the other side, Alvarez does have a strong fan base and his inclusion in the UFC’s lightweight division would generate a lot of buzz, more so if he wins his Octagon debut. The money that he could potentially earn is certainly more than Bellator would be willing to pay to keep a former marquee fighter.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see what the court’s decide, as well as whether or not this recent event has left a sour taste in ‘The Silent Assassin’s’ mouth. If this is the case, and the court decides to rule in favor for Bellator, Alvarez may opt to sit for a year until he is entirely free of any contract obligations to the Chicago promotion.