Fighter Pay: A Reckoning?
Mixed martial artists competing in the UFC have, for too long, been underpaid and undervalued. Is there finally an opportunity for this to change?
I. The Life and Times of Tony Ferguson
“I’m waiting for insurance. I’ve been competing in this sport for a long time,” said Tony Ferguson, adorned with ray-bans while sitting backwards in his chair, talking to the mixed martial arts press. Wednesday, May 4th, 2022, was media day for the Ultimate Fighting Championship for their upcoming event, UFC 274. On this day, fighters scheduled to compete on the fight card that upcoming Saturday, May 7th, would go to the media and answer questions. Among those fighters was grizzled veteran and beloved fan favourite Tony “El Cucuy” Ferguson, who was going to compete in a featured bout against former multiple-time Bellator lightweight champion and former UFC lightweight title challenger Michael Chandler.
Ferguson, who had turned 38 that February, had been fighting in the UFC for over a decade, and had been competing at the top of the lightweight (155 lbs) division for over half that time Fans like myself feel their age, along with his, when the see Ferguson’s once-black hair was going salt-and-pepper. His career in the UFC began on the thirteenth season of their signature reality show competition, The Ultimate Fighter, which Ferguson won despite competing in a heavier weight class – welterweight (170 lbs), thus putting himself at a large weight disadvantage – in 2011. He won two fights afterwards before losing a decision to Michael Johnson in 2012.
Afterwards, Ferguson took a year off due to injury before competing again in October 2013 at UFC 166, where he won against Mike Rio in under two minutes, collecting a Submission of the Night bonus while doing so. His victory against Rio marked the beginning of a legendary winning streak, where he went undefeated in all twelve of his fights between 2013 and 2019. Among others, Tony Ferguson beat longtime UFC veteran Gleison Tibeau, former Strikeforce lightweight champion Josh Thompson, fan favourite striker Edson Barboza, former UFC lightweight champion Rafael Dos Anjos, former UFC lightweight champion and final WEC lightweight champion Anthony Pettis, and UFC lightweight title challenger Donald Cerrone. For six years, Tony Ferguson went undefeated in the UFC’s most talent-rich division and beat among the best fighters they had to offer.
In the process, he also won the interim lightweight championship in 2017 against Kevin Lee, as in the absence of Conor McGregor, who had decided to focus on boxing instead, the UFC decided to create an interim title to keep the division going, in effect making Ferguson the de facto lightweight champ. As McGregor did not return to MMA until October 2018; almost a full year after Ferguson won his interim title, the UFC decided to strip McGregor of his belt, and booked Ferguson to fight Khabib Nurmagomedov in April 2018 for the undisputed belt. Ferguson and Nurmagomdeov had been booked to fight three times previously, each booking falling apart before it could occur. Unfortunately, the fourth booking for April 2018 collapsed a week before due to a freak accident, where Ferguson tore his LCL after tripping on a chord backstage while doing media for the UFC. Ferguson’s interim lightweight title was stripped from him, and Nurmagomedov won the vacant undisputed lightweight championship against a different opponent. Ferguson returned six months later, an abnormally quick turnaround after such a devastating injury to fight and beat Anthony Pettis.
Nurmagomedov, now champion, was booked to fight Ferguson in April 2020, almost two years after their fourth booking collapsed. Regrettably, this booking coincided with the wide spread of COVID-19 across the globe. Bans on air travel from Russia and the subsequent illness and death of Nurmagomedov’s father and head coach Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov from COVID prevented him from competing for months, and he withdrew from his fifth and final booking against Tony Ferguson. In lieu of Nurmagomedov’s withdrawal, Ferguson was instead booked to face former World Series of Fighting lightweight champion Justin Gaethje for a newly created interim championship in May. Ferguson was thoroughly dismantled in all five rounds by Gaethje, whose superior power and leg kicks overwhelmed Ferguson, leading to a fifth round stoppage. Afterwards, Ferguson fought again in December 2020, where he lost to now-lightweight champion Charles Oliveira, and in May 2021 to Beneil Dariush, being outgrappled in both fights.
Returning a year later, Ferguson said at the media scrum that he was reenergized, with a new approach to his training and mindset, reemphasizing having fun again while fighting. He also used the twenty-four minute scrum to savage the UFC. Ferguson noted that he thinks that UFC fighters are underpaid, that the UFC prevents fighters from pursuing other athletic pursuits, such as boxing, professional wrestling, and that Dana White is like a drug dealer. “I took a bad fall at FOX, they [the UFC] took my title from me… I should’ve sued. But what I did is felt good for my company; I wanted to be the man, and I wanted to make sure I showed everyone else I fuckin’ could do this stuff without anyone else’s help, so that’s a little bit of a chip on my shoulder.” Ferguson displayed his passion for the sport and fans, and also his frustration with the UFC, with his exploitation. It was a remarkable display of honesty that made one of the UFC’s most likeable and exciting fighters even more sympathetic. And given his fan base – MMAFighting’s video of his scrum garnered over half a million views, higher than the videos of anyone else fighting on that card – it’s a dire message to get out to MMA fans.
That Saturday, Ferguson was brutally knocked out by Michael Chandler in the second round.
II. The Brutal Realities of Mixed Martial Arts.
Mixed Martial Art is a curious sport. Its inception in North America was met with a moral panic, spearheaded by John McCain; McCain condemned MMA and the burgeoning UFC as “human cockfighting.” The moral panics about heavy metal and Dungeons and Dragons are easily laughed about today, but the crusade against MMA nearly killed it in the West. At one point in the late 90s, MMA was banned in most states, and the pay-per-view audiences collapsed. The UFC almost folded, and MMA had to transform or die.
And transform it did. The ruleset of MMA changed and became clearly defined, and state athletic commissions were tasked with overseeing the sport. As the UFC entered the 2000s, audiences started returning, and states began legalizing it (New York state infamously took until 2016 to become the final state to legalize MMA thanks to the influence of a New York culinary union.) Thanks in part to the success of the 2005 finale of The Ultimate Fighter’s first season, the fanbase for the UFC exploded. UFC 66, on New Years Eve ‘06, was the first pay-per-view to crack a million buys. The UFC produced break-out stars with some crossover appeal, like Randy Couture, Tito Ortiz, Chuck Liddell, BJ Penn, Georges St. Pierre, and others. Anthony Pettis appeared on the Wheaties box, and Ronda Rousey regularly appeared on Ellen. UFC prelims and free Fight Night cards are broadcasted on ESPN, and before 2019 were broadcasted on FOX Sports. As the UFC changed – thus changing MMA in the process – they gained substantial success, and almost broke through to the mainstream, something unimaginable in 1997 when much of America either thought of MMA as human cockfighting, or thought nothing of it altogether.
As a result, the UFC has become very rich. Last year, the UFC bragged to the media about how they had their best ever financial year, with the CFO of their parent company Endeavor saying that UFC revenue was up 30%. Per the excellent reporting of Josh Nash, the UFC made over a billion dollars in revenue last year. Endeavor, the UFC’s parent company, made over $5 billion last year. The massive profit the UFC is making is partially the result of just how little UFC fighters make. This year, the revenue split between the UFC and their roster was 17.5% of the revenue going to the fighters, the rest to the company. To provide comparison, NBA athletes receive 51% of the NBA’s revenue, NFL athletes receive 48% of the NFL’s revenue, and NHL athletes receive at least 50% of the NHL’s revenue. The UFC may have accomplished legitimizing MMA as a sport on par with basketball, football, and hockey, but they do not pay their athletes as such. Discussing fighter pay is somewhat slippery however. Asininely, the state athletic commissions which regulate MMA bouts in most states, including the UFC’s home state of Nevada, do not require the UFC or any other organization to disclose fighter payouts. Only the California State Athletic Commission discloses fighter pay now.
The complicity of athletic commissions in aiding the UFC’s oppression of its roster aside, what is the pay and lifestyle of mixed-martial artists? After accepting a contract, fighters will go into a fight camp, usually for a period around eight-to-twelve weeks. For some fighters, they essentially stay in camp year-round, preferring to stay conditioned in case they are offered a short-notice fight. This fight camp is a gruelling period of training and dieting, as fighters have to spend multiple hours a day training different aspects of their “game,” including not just combat itself, but also getting one’s body into prime shape through a rigorous regimen of strength and conditioning training, while also dieting down to a size that cutting weight is doable.
By the week of the fight, fighters should be adequately prepared for the fight, albeit only after accruing injuries from camp. These injuries are usually minor but can be quite serious. Fighters spend fight week doing press and media while also doing the most intense part of their weight cuts, which involves rapidly dehydrating their bodies in order to make their weight limit. In the process of weight cutting, fighters dehydrate their brains and other organs, making them susceptible to greater trauma during their fights. Likewise, the weight cutting process is so harsh that many fighters are unable to make weight, or even collapse before or during the weigh-ins on Friday morning. The fighters that do make weight generally look gaunt, and frankly, terrible on the scales. Weight cutting is an awful and unhealthy process that is perpetrated by fighters trying to use having a higher weight to better bully their opponents. And then, on Saturday evening, they fight, often causing themselves grievous bodily injuries. Afterwards, they get paid, and the cycle repeats. These injuries range from broken orbital bones, ruptured knee ligaments, devastating shinbone fractures, and concussions. Thankfully, no one has died in the octagon or directly from a fight in the UFC. However, deaths do occur on the amateur and regional circuit.
These concussions are relevant beyond their short term implications. Fighters who have long careers at the highest levels of the sport will have been punched, kicked, kneed, and elbowed in the head thousands of times in the octagon, let alone while sparring and drilling. The culmination of many concussions and general accumulation of strikes to the head has led to permanent brain injury. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), where athletes suffer from dementia due to sustained and repeated head trauma, has become a staple of sports like boxing and football, as many athletes have come and gone, prospered and retired, and then withered away due to early-onset dementia. Cases like Sugar Ray Robinson, who died of Alzheimer’s at 67, or the suicide of NFL athletes Junior Seau at 43 and Dave Duerson at 50 because of the agony of CTE have shook those communities. In MMA, we are at such a stage where there have been no high profile deaths from CTE yet – CTE can only be conclusively diagnosed upon autopsy. There have been no notable deaths yet that have affected change or even serious concern. That said, the “old guard” of MMA have started displaying symptoms in line with neurological degeneration. MMAFighting’s Steven Marrocco wrote an excellent piece on Spencer “King” Fisher, who was at the time one of MMA’s most thrilling fighters. Since leaving the UFC and MMA, Fisher has entered the earliest stages of dementia while receiving zero compensation from the UFC. Other fighters who have opened up on their suffering of CTE symptoms include former PRIDE middleweight champion Wanderlei Silva, former Strikeforce light heavyweight champion Renato “Babalu” Sobral, and Gary Goodridge, who fought in the eighth UFC event.
How much do fighters get paid? Using the figures from UFC 270, the most recent UFC event in California, there were fighters who were paid as low as $10,000. These fighters, who spent two-to-three months training and dieting hard to reach their athletic apex, who removed often times twenty pounds of water, if not more, in the span of hours, from their bodies, thus making them more susceptible to the harm they incur on Saturday, are sometimes paid just $10,000. After taxes, travel expenses, healthcare, and paying their manager and coaches – a fighter’s training camp requires the assistance of multiple professional coaches, dieticians, and training facilities – a fighter is left with nothing. The fighters who are making just $10,000 lost out on a potential extra $10,000 because they lost on a “win bonus.” Clearly, $20,000 is still a poor sum, but these fighters go through so much just to make so little. Fighter pay is clearly an injustice; the UFC makes so much money yet pays their fighters so little. Far removed from the days of John McCain trying to run them out of business, there is no reason other than unfettered greed that the UFC does not adequately pay their roster. Though mixed martial artists live at the athletic apex, the injuries and lack of pay mean that when fighters retire, they often leave the sport both physically, mentally, spiritually, and financially exhausted. They depart MMA broke and broken.
III. A Reckoning on Fighter Pay?:
The 2020 survey conducted by The Athletic revealed that 77% of interviewed fighters feel the UFC (and other MMA organizations like Bellator, the PFL, etc.) does not adequately pay them, while almost 71% thought that outside of COVID, finances were their biggest issue. If the fighter survey is indicative of anything, it is that fighters at-large are conscious of how mistreated they are financially. There are public exceptions, of course, like Michael Chandler and Sam Alvey as two notable cases of fighters who dismiss the notion of a fighter pay issue existing. Likewise, almost 80% of surveyed fighters favour creating a fighter’s union, yet the chances of forming a viable union were dismissed by many because of the competitive and individualistic nature of the sport. Pro-union fighters argued that they needed a top star for the UFC to push for collective bargaining before any such union could be viable, someone with enough pull among fans and fighters to push enough fighters to come together.
Arguably the highest profile attempt at viable fighter unionization thus far was the Mixed Martial Arts Athletes Association (MMAAA), which formed in late 2016 and included one of the sport’s biggest pay-per-view draw, two-time Welterweight champion, and greatest mixed martial artist ever, Georges St. Pierre, along with former Heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez, then-Bantamweight champion TJ Dillashaw, Donald Cerrone, and Tim Kennedy. Per Marc Raimondi, the MMAAA sought three goals; a settlement between the UFC and past and present UFC fighters; make the revenue split between fighters and the organization a 50-50 arrangement; and get a collective bargaining agreement between fighters and the UFC.
Within a week, the entire push began to fall apart. Donald Cerrone quickly distanced himself from the association, and TJ Dillashaw lamented how the association had seemingly faded into dust. Tim Kennedy, in a recent interview with Ariel Helwani, said that a collective sense of fear among most fighters of the consequences of unionization prevented the MMAAA from ever gathering momentum. This is despite the MMAAA being launched with Georges St. Pierre’s involvement, a man who has consistently been one of the UFC’s biggest stars. As the polling by The Athletic shows, a commanding majority of professional mixed martial artists want to unionize, yet, as the example of the MMAAA and other attempts at creating a fighter’s union illustrate, there is too much fear among fighters to do so. Without the backing of most fighters at once, there will never be an MMA union.
Still, even if fear rules over fighters at-large, there is increasingly open dialogue about the dissatisfaction that fighters feel. Tony Ferguson is one such example, of a fighter openly discussing his alienation with how the organization has treated him. At the age of 38, Ferguson has publicly suffered a broken arm, lung issues, and a destroyed knee. For over a decade now, Ferguson has sacrificed his physical well-being to get paid a pittance and have title opportunities slip away from him at the last possible moment, while still consistently being one of the sport’s best and most entertaining athletes.
More disturbingly however has been the effects of the sport on his brain. After absorbing 552 strikes to his head in the UFC (per UFCStats; the number of strikes Ferguson has had landed on him in his UFC career has since risen to 968) Ferguson’s wife had to file a restraining order against him, not because he was abusive but out of concern for his own safety. Ferguson was said to be experiencing insomnia, and paranoia over someone placing a computer chip in his leg. The restraining order has since been lifted and his life with his wife and child is apparently back to normal, but this was a frightening incident. Ferguson’s passion for MMA is undeniable, but the only reason he should desire competing again is because of that passion, not out of the need to feed his family. Regardless if head trauma caused or exacerbated his aforementioned psychological issues, there is no way that continued beatings would make those symptoms better. Even worse, he has won only one of his five fights since this incident, with two of those losses coming by way of (technical) knockout. After giving up so much to fight the best in the world, he should never have to worry about his finances again. Tony Ferguson is right to demand better pay, to demand healthcare and insurance.
Unfortunately, despite being a legend of the sport, his recent slump in the Octagon gives him little leverage. However, Tony Ferguson is not the only fighter recently who has openly criticized the UFC. Current heavyweight champion and devastating power puncher Francis Ngannou has had a remarkable career. He grew up mining sand in Cameroon, dreaming of boxing. As an adult, he made the trek north to Morocco, where he was eventually able to make it to Spain after multiple attempts. From Spain, he moved to Paris, where he moved into a gym, shifted to MMA, and began training. He made it to the UFC in 2015, and he won the heavyweight belt in 2021. Soon after winning the belt, Ngannou decided to take a couple months off before he began training again, using the well-earned time to return to Cameroon and celebrate his victory with his friends and family while also visiting his foundation that provides martial arts training for young Cameroonians. Despite him being uninjured and merely wanting personal time off, the UFC wanted to book him for another fight straight away. When Ngannou refused, they decided to create an interim heavyweight championship and shelve Ngannou for the rest of the year. Beyond cheapening what championship should mean by creating an interim belt for an uninjured champion, this was just a spiteful insult to Ngannou for not complying with the UFC’s demands. Ngannou went on to beat interim champion Cyril Gane in January.
The creation of the interim title served as a tipping point. Ngannou was critical of the decision to create an interim title, but expanded his criticism of the UFC to fighter pay and fighter mobility. Ngannou was paid $600,000 for his fight against Gane; a respectable sum, but he is still the heavyweight champion – the “baddest man on the planet.” He should be making millions every time he fights, no question. Though he has reached the apex of MMA, Ngannou still has ambitions of being a boxing champion; he wants to fight heavyweight boxing champ Tyson Fury. Personally, it is hard seeing such a fight going well for Ngannou, given the calibre of boxing Fury possesses. However, as both men have indicated their interest in competing with each other in the ring, there is no reason to stop them. Yet, the UFC and Dana White continue to block Ngannou from doing so. Adding insult to injury, Ngannou actually did injure himself after his fight with Gane; he tore his ACL and will likely be out of competition for the rest of the year. As such, Dana White has already floated creating another interim heavyweight title while Ngannou recuperates.
It’s hard to predict how the fight for fighter’s rights will go. One could reasonably assume that they should have already won better pay, or insurance for healthcare, or a guarantee that the UFC will take care of them and their families once their bodies are such that they cannot fight anymore. Since this has not passed and fighters at-large are still afraid of unionizing, who's to say they ever will? Still, the discussion by fighters on how poorly the UFC treats them has become increasingly open, and with someone like Francis Ngannou, the reigning heavyweight champion, advocating for fighters, there could be some kind of reckoning on fighter pay. If Ngannou utilizes his unique position well and continues to resist the UFC’s domineering attitude, he could very well start something crucial for fighters.