McGregor is set to make around $7 million off a proposed UFC antitrust settlement, but he’s missing out on millions more due to a legal waiver added to UFC contracts.
What a wild couple of weeks Conor McGregor has had. “The Notorious” missed out on a multi-million dollar fight purse when he was forced to pull out of UFC 303 with a broken toe. But he made a decent chunk of those lost earnings back through several shrewd big-money bets on MMA and soccer.
Mystic Mac banked a million dollars off Nate Diaz beating Jorge Masvidal, and then won two more million dollar bets on Spain winning the Euros and Argentina winning Copa. If he continues to be lucky, a U.S. judge will sign off this week on a $335 million UFC antitrust settlement deal that will pay him around $7 million in illegally suppressed wages.
That’s more than any other fighter on the roster will get, but McGregor is still being massively underpaid. Because of a legally questionable arbitration clause added to his contract, he’s only receiving extra compensation for his fights from 2014-2017. The proposed settlement maths out to roughly 20% of his total UFC earnings during that period.
For the period from 2017 to 2020, when he fought Floyd Mayweather, Khabib Nurmagomedov, and Donald Cerrone? He will only be eligible for a flat fee of $3000.
That’s because sometime between those years, the UFC added an arbitration clause to their contracts that bars fighters from participating in class action lawsuits. The result: just 10% of the $215 million left over after lawyers take their cut is making it to fighters in the 2017-2020 class — the lucky ones who never signed away their legal rights. More than half will get three grand and that’s basically it.
The situation is so rough that the judge overseeing the case has suggested he may not approve the settlement due to how little some are getting in money and injunctive relief. That would force the case to a jury trial, where all twelve jurors would have to agree with fighters that the UFC used monopsony power to keep pay down.
Experts during pre-trail hearings presented compelling evidence that UFC athletes got bilked out of $1.6 billion in wages, and treble damages could push the punishment for that up to $4.8 billion. So it’s big risk, big reward … and big waits, because even a win for the fighters would be appealed, probably all the way up to the Supreme Court.
But if Conor McGregor wants to, he could do the funniest thing ever and opt out of the 2017-2020 class so he can use that arbitration clause in his favor.
“It would cost him a lot of money,” UFC Antitrust expert John Nash said in a recent podcast. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps even millions. Because you’d have to hire your own experts and do all the analysis and stuff the antitrust trial did again. But go into arbitration, because truthfully, someone like McGregor, I think you could realistically make an argument that he’s owed $100 million by the UFC.”
“If you’re really under a waiver, Conor McGregor and fighters like him, the very top guys — it’s it’s not financially possible for most fighters to do this. But for the very top guys, I would think about opting out of the [2017-2020] class and going into arbitration.”
Would McGregor do that to his friends and business partners at the UFC? It’d be a long hard fight that would derail the biggest comeback in sports history. But if the UFC tries to hang him out to dry with two fights left on his contract? Well, there’s always the nuclear option.