By Thomas Mangieri
Mixed martial arts (MMA) is one of the largest growing sports currently, and its premier league, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), sits at the top of all other MMA leagues, being worth about $12 billion.
With an event coming to the Amalie Arena for the fourth time on Dec. 14, now is the time to bring up a commonly talked about issue in the UFC: the pay.
Most professional sports leagues like the MLB, NHL, and NFL have around a 50-50 share with their players. The UFC has an incredibly predatory approach when it comes to paying its fighters, only giving a 16-20% share to its fighters.
Pay in the UFC varies per fight and fighter level, but the floor for pay is $12,000 to show, and $12,000 to win. While that’s the floor, the median is a little over $51,000, but 43% of fighters made under $45,000 in 2024, according to The Quinnipiac Chronicle.
However, the fighters don’t see that entire payout. The UFC taxes their fighters 30% annually, and with a global roster, the fighters have to pay international fees as well.
Getting to the fight also requires money. The UFC will pay for your flight and one coach, but typically, fighters have a team of coaches. Additionally, the gym that trains you typically takes about 5-10% from your fight. These are just a few of the many costs, but an interview with Myles Jury in 2015 totaled about $14,500 to his base earnings of $20k, leaving him with a $5,500 profit.
The highest someone ever made from a UFC fight would be Brock Lesnar at UFC 200, where he would take home a reported $8 million. However, his fight purse was $2,500,000, three times more than the second-highest paid fighter in that event.
The reason that he took home that $8 million and had such a high purse was because he demanded he had a flat fee and got a cut of the pay per views because UFC 200 was a big growing event for the UFC. With Brock Lesnar coming off of his World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) career, both Lesnar and UFC CEO Dana White knew a lot of potential future MMA fans would pay to watch this fight, and they did, with UFC 200 setting records for the sport.
Why can the UFC pay so little if they are the only major sports league that does?
The UFC, like other large sports leagues, dominates the market for its sport. While there may be other fighting leagues, the UFC is considered the most prestigious, and its talented roster backs that.
The roster paired with the constant promotion of their top people, which helps them outside the UFC, like heavyweight champ Alex Pereira who just got signed to be in an A24 film, Ronda Rousey who made it into a Fast & Furious film, Conor McGregor who made his own alcohol brand, etc.
Another reason the UFC is able to payout this amount is because of the way they sign their fighters. With their competitors signed as contractors rather than employees, fighters don’t get the same benefits and workplace protections that employees would.
This means the fighters don’t have collective bargaining agreements like in other sports, making unionization more difficult. While this does not cut unionization completely out of the picture, unionization is made even more difficult, with CEO Dana White being part of a panel whose job is to pick who fights who in the UFC. A lot of UFC fighters have loyalty towards White, which is another hurdle for the UFC to unionize because those fighters want to maintain that loyalty to White.
The largest reason that the UFC is still this way would be because of White, who has said he won’t increase pay significantly as long as he’s around and that fighters “get paid what they’re supposed to get paid.” White’s reasoning is that he doesn’t want the UFC to end up like boxing, with the fight purses being so large the company loses money on the fights and can’t make some fights.
Some people may not fully grasp the issues presented by this pay and see that some fighters make $500,000 per fight, with the median salary being over $51,000. Even $20,000 is nothing to really scoff at.
Many top guys are making a good amount of money per fight, along with the mid- to high-level fights making low to mid six figures. A good amount don’t make that money and get signed to that $20,000 deal, which they don’t even get to see that full amount. Even the fighters that do make those larger numbers could and should be making more with the money these fights rake in.
In 2022, only two fighters made over six figures: Israel Adesanya who fought three times, and Alexander Volkanovski fighting twice. In that same year, the UFC made a whopping $1.14 billion with the UFC profiting $387 million. While the profits for the UFC were enormous and record setting for the company, they were directly tied to cuts made to fighter pay, with the UFC reportedly reducing fighters and saving an estimated $32.8 million between 2021 and 2022, according to LowKickMMA. With that amount of profit and proof that they actually cut pay to increase profits, it shows the inadequacy of White’s excuse.
The money is undoubtedly there in the UFC, and with its growth becoming more significant in recent years, there should be no question on whether to pay these fighters what they are worth.
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Photo courtesy of UFC.com.