Fighter pay is a hot-button issue amongst fans, but in reality, it shouldn’t be—what fighters make and what promoters choose to pay them isn’t the business of fans.
It has become posh for fans to complain incessantly about how the UFC abuses their fighters by paying them low wages, especially in light of ESPN’s recent piece on the matter.
The typical line of argumentation is this: The UFC makes millions in pay-per-view buys and live gates, yet they only pay the fighters a pittance while Dana White and the Fertitta brothers rake in the cash!
People who back this belief are wishful thinkers; they hate Dana White and Zuffa, so they like to think the fighters are being screwed.
But they aren’t.
First of all, the money made from PPVs and livegates doesn’t all go into Zuffa’s pockets.
It costs money to rent a venue, and the PPV carriers take a cut of the PPV profits. So then after that money is spent, the rest can be given to the fighters, right?
Wrong.
What about the people in marketing? Ad campaigns don’t come cheap. What about the custodians in the Zuffa headquarters? They need money, too. And what about the other dozens and dozens of salaries that Zuffa has to shell out?
MMA fans who criticize what fighters make are ignoring one of the fundamental tenets of MMA: Don’t criticize a fighter if you yourself have never fought.
While Zuffa is a company and not a fighter, the same rule applies. Few MMA fans have run a company the size of Zuffa. They don’t know how hard it must be, and they don’t know how much money Zuffa nets after an event.
Zuffa as a private company has no obligation to show us their books.
But what the MMA world does know is this: The fighters who are “underpaid” struggle hard to make it to the UFC, and when you proportion how many hours they’ve trained for the fight to how much they get paid, it’s not that much money—but it’s a fair wage.
It’s a fair wage because fighters who are on an undercard making $6,000 to show and $6,000 to win likely won’t make Zuffa that much money in return.
For example, let’s take the most recent event, UFC 145.
The lowest paid match of the night was an undercard bout between Chris Clements and Keith Wisniewski.
Clements made $12,000 ($6,000 to show and $6,000 win bonus), and Wisniewski took home $10,000 for his valiant but ultimately losing effort. Thus, the UFC had to spend $22,000 for that fight to take place.
It’s almost certain that Clements vs. Wisniewski didn’t generate $22,000 worth of PPV buys or ticket sales, so if anything, Zuffa was being generous to them.
How much of a loss are they expected to take on fighters that might never pan out?
Overpaying fighters is just as bad for the sport as underpaying them! Look at organizations like the IFL, EliteXC, and Affliction. All of them overpaid fighters to a ridiculous degree ($126,000 for Tank Abbott, seriously?) and all of them folded. See a connection?
Zuffa can’t constantly bend to the will of “hardore” fans who insist that fighters make more money (yet these are sometimes the same fans who pirate PPVs for any number of numerous misguided reasons).
Fighter pay is fair, and fans should just stop the whining about it. If fighters want more money, they can pursue a more lucrative career—problem solved. No one put a gun to their head and forced them to fight in a cage for a living.
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