UFC 146 salaries: Headliners Dos Santos and Mir to make flat $200K paydays

1) Boxing is a traditional sport with a history of over a century and a significant and recognized place in international sporting culture.

2) MMA as an organized sport in the West has existed for ten years or so. The flagship company promoting it has been profitable for a little bit more than half a decade. It's completely unrealistic to expect the top end of the athlete pay to be the same.

3) Top guys earning $20 million for fighting handpicked opponents has crippled boxing. I don't want to see the UFC paying a champion $10 or $15 million guaranteed base pay for a fight. I'd rather that money be spent on things like international development for the sport, medical coverage for all fighters, **** like that.

4) GSP got paid $200k to show and $200k to win against BJ Penn. But he's on record as saying that a title fight puts "4-5 million" in his pocket. So why aren't we all bitching about how one of the UFC's greatest champions gets paid less than half a million for successfully defending his belt against a fellow ATG? :huh

:hat

 

Interesting figure came out yesterday...Nick Diaz was paid a $300,000 bonus to do promo work in the leadup to UFC143

 

1. True

2. No one heres asking for MMA fighters to be paid the same as boxers. People are just asking that they get their fair cut of the profits

3. I agree with you. But Zuffa are making huge profilts, and not paying their fighters accordingly

4. Zuffa pays one of the GOAT fighters in the history of the sport under half a million for his main event fight and you wonder why people are disgusted?


Forget about sponsors. They exist in every popular sport. The issue here is what the organization who governs the fighters pays their employees. And its ****ing disgusting

 

The point Beouche is that they didn't pay GSP that half a million when his bonus and pay per view points were factored in. The pay given by the commissions is just a fraction of what the headliners earn direct from the UFC.

 

What sort of fraction?

And is this true for every UFC fighter?

 

No one knows the full details as the UFC is so secretive. The best two examples are Couture in 2007 and Overeem in 2011. Couture earned around a million to face Sylvia and Overeen earned two million. Both way above what the commissions reported. Given that Rebney claimed the UFC had offered Lombard ppv points, I think you'd be looking at dozens of fighters having such clauses in their contract. Although these will only be activated on cersin situations.

As for other bonuses I've been led to believe by people like Meltzer that the vast majority of fighters get something even if its only an extra 10grand, but they can be a lot more. Often like with Overeem (signing bonus) or Diaz (promo work) they can be significant amount.

 

Theyre secretive for a reason. If they were paying their fighters properly they wouldnt have anything to hide

Couture and Overeem are two of the biggest draws in the history of the sport, and so of course they have to be paid more. Even at that, giving a monster draw like Overeem under 2M base is laughable

The point remains - regardless of what they pay their fighters in bonuses, they dont pay their fighters ****


You have a good insight into things Will, and a great platform to shout your voice. i dont understand why you dont rip these tight money grabbing *******s to shreds

 

Will I don't know if you have seen my only previous post but I was wondering if tax wouldn't have anything to do with that ?

In exemple the bonus do not get taxed but the official money is !

 

Ne5ville14; All income has to be taxed, so no bonus money doesn't make any difference tax wise. What it gives the UFC is flexibility - if a show bombs then they're not on the hook for having to pay a lot of flat salaries, instead they can just pair back the extra-contractual payments. Also they can use the money as incentives to get fighters to do things like promotional work they'd rather not do.

Keeping salaries secret also has the benefit for them of reducing salary inflation for several reasons. Firstly, if everyone knows what everyone's earning then fighters are more likely to demand they earn more than X is. That's actually the reason Henderson left the UFC in 2009 - he was pissed he was being offered less than Tito Ortiz. Secondly it also makes it harder for competitors to come in and offer to pay UFC fighters more than what Zuffa does. Finally it makes it less likely that fighters are going to have to deal with people in their everyday life who know how much they earn and so seek to screw more money out of them when they come to buy stuff. These are reasons why its usually very difficult to find out precisely how much anyone in the entertainment world earns unless the sector is heavily unionised.

Beouche, I guess I just don't see things as black and white as you. Zuffa aren't perfect but their far from the slave drivers your trying to portray them as. They have a lot of fighters under contract, more than Golden Boy and Top Rank combined, and its unrealistic to expect all of those to be paid excellent money. Indeed I think most people would agree that Zuffa treat prelim fighters better than almost any other promoter in history. And by introducing benefits like the accident insurance that are literally unprecedented in combat sports history they're doing much more the minimum standard.

 

Oh and I'm baffled at the idea that Overeem or Couture are among the two biggest draws in the sport. I can kinda see the argument for Randy but the pay per view in question underperformed against expectations and really his big ppvs were against guys with more name values (Liddell and Lesnar). Other than Brock fight, Overeem has never drawn a damn thing in his life - mid-card guy in Pride, became a star in K-1 when it was dying and only major fight in Strikeforce did nothing special business wise.

 

Exactly. Overeem is nothing close to "one of the biggest draws in the history of the sport." That's absolutely laughable. atsch The truth is, Overeem was only the 5th highest selling Brock Lesnar opponent. Behind Mir 2, Couture, Carwin and Velasquez. And that fight was the first time most of the North American audience had ever seen him. ****ing Dan Hardy sold more PPVs to challenge GSP than Overeem did to fight the biggest PPV seller in MMA history.

:hat

 

So if a headliner gets $200k base pay and then bonuses totaling another three million dollars, he's getting paid "****" because you only count the $200k and not the millions that the rest of the agreement provides? atsch

http://bjpenn.com/mmanews/2011/11/10/gsp-confirms-average-income-of-4-5-million-per-fight-7708.html


So $4-5 million dollars per fight for GSP is not enough? He's getting paid "****"? :huh

I tell you what. Go to GSP and ask him if, for his next fight, he wants a base pay of $3 million plus a half-million bonus if he wins the fight, with no other bonuses or incentives. Or he can keep his current contract with its $200k base rate and stacks of incentives and bonuses.

Guess what, moron? The $200k base rate plus bonuses contract puts more money in GSP's pocket than the $3 million flat rate contract does. :deal

:hat

 

Any thoughts on that one, Beouche?

You'll be pretending that the UFC only pays Diaz $200k to main-event UFC 143 against Condit.

But they gave him more than that just to show up to press conferences and do some interviews.

So are you going to keep pretending that Diaz is getting ass-raped by the UFC accountants? ****, give me a job where I get paid a $300k bonus just for a month of doing what I'm supposed to do as part of my job anyway. :blood

:hat

 

Pretty solid point Will...

but for me the best exemple is still McCorkle article...if he is making 30k per fight then I think it's really not that bad !

 

And if he breaks his hand during a UFC fight, or while training for a fight, he doesn't pay for the doctor's bills or the cost of the surgery either. :good

If he broke his hand during a PRIDE fight, one of the employees backstage might give him a street map and tell him which subway stop will drop him off closest to the hospital. :yep

:hat