Eddie Alvarez’s next contract as a fighter was destined to be decided by the courts ever since he agreed to a “first refusal” clause with his current promotion, Bellator.
That clause means that, once he became a free agent in November, Alvarez, 28, was free to field offers from any other promotion, as long as Bellator was given 14 days to match the offer.
Being that he is the most desired free agent in MMA, no promotion could ever match the offer the UFC could put on the table, simply because it’s the biggest in the whole of the promotion.
That means, if Bellator wanted to keep the lightweight sensation, they were always going to have to fight for him.
Earlier we noted that the UFC offered Alvarez an eight-fight contract worth $70,000 in “show” money for each fight, plus a $70,000 bonus for each win with an additional $5,000 escalation for each additional win, to a maximum of $210,000. The UFC also offered a $250,000 signing bonus.
Alvarez would get an immediate title shot if he joins the UFC, as well as a coaching spot on a season of The Ultimate Fighter, a fight on a Fox card and three commentary opportunities.
In a detailed analysis of court documents by Sports Illustrated, it’s clear that Bellator lawyers, under instruction from president Bjorn Rebney, went to great pains to match the UFC’s offer.
Bellator, which was recently purchased by media conglomerate Viacom, also offered Alvarez front-line TV promotion, which includes a Spike TV behind-the-scenes special, for which he’d be compensated $25,000; a season-two coaching position on Bellator‘s reality TV show (with the caveat that he must win back the Bellator title first) carrying a $100,000 payday; and a one-time, guest-host stint during Spike’s “Road to the Championship” series.
As SI says:
Other than these added incentives, the Zuffa and Bellator contract offers mostly mirror one another, and for good reason. Bellator deliberately took Zuffa‘s contract and red-lined it, substituting its own name in for Zuffa‘s, so the aforementioned terms, and their verbiage, remained unaltered. (This red-lined version was included in Bellator‘s lawsuit exhibits).
However, Alvarez’s lawyer, Steve Klein, in an email to Rebney, said the two offers were not identical. Bellator‘s claim largely hinges on whether fighting on Fox Network Television with the UFC is the same as fighting on Spike TV with Bellator.
“Match means match. Match means provision by provision, term by term,” said Klein (h/t SI).
Term by term, they have to offer the same thing…[Fox Network Television to Spike TV] is, of course, clearly the most major change… The value of the contracts are different, as is the ability to deliver under the contracts… Monetarily, it will mean different things to [Alvarez.] This is not a match.
This argument raises the obvious conclusion that Bellator never really had the capacity to match the UFC’s offer considering that Bellator doesn’t have a Fox deal. But Rebney insists, in Bellator’s submission to the New Jersey courthouse which is deciding the case; that Spike’s audience of 100 million is equivalent to Fox’s 110 million, even though the former is on paid cable while the latter is on free-to-air television.
“We can ultimately match [a Fox bout’s] numbers very easily by replaying Ed’s fights in primetime on Spike TV,” said Rebney. “It boils down to how many people see the fight, and we’re completely prepared, if that became an issue, to replay Ed’s fights.”
The case continues.
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