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Context. Im responding to the notion that Fight Night fights are all hugging and no risk taking.
Deadspin: Whatever Happened To The UFC?
- Thread starter ShogunOfBuyMore
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Context. Im responding to the notion that Fight Night fights are all hugging and no risk taking.
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I dont care about ratings, increase or decrease in popularity. Im just saying it has always been a platform for prospects. People are wondering why the UFC is putting on Fight Night cards with unknowns and prospects as if it were a new thing. Im just saying it has always been this way for better or.worse.
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Yet people are and they are expecting a bigger product still. They need to rename it or brand it as something else.
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They could rename it Prospect Night and rename prelims to "the unknowns portion of the card" and people would still bitch.
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So you want to cut a div that houses one of the UFC's only stars? Brilliant idea.
ShogunOfBuyMore
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The analogy to the NBA D-League is interesting for another reasons.
NBA D-League basketball players don't need to have part-time jobs in order to survive.
Many (most?) "elite," "best of the best" UFC fighter need to have part-time jobs to get by.
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UFC will continue to trend downwards as long as it keeps losing more stars than it makes. That's the main issue with this "sport". Nobody cares about the fights, people want to see stars. It's hilarious because this was what UFC fans said would happen to the sweet science LMAO.
Sports writers are eternally stupid when it comes to MMA. "Imagine if the NBA added 30 expansion teams" well imagine if they added 210 new players every year, oh wait, they do.
The UFC adds new fighters because thats how you build champions. Are they suppose to have a roster of 20 guys and just sign a new person every time they have a title shot?
Go through an NBA season, how many games actually matter, like really? 10-15? Half the games are played at 10% with the last 20 seconds only counting. Same with the NHL, more than 50% of the teams make the playoffs, which means almost the entire regular season doesn't matter. Baseball, out of 30 teams there are 5-6 out of it within the first week, hell they've been out of it for months, another 4-5 are done by the allstar break and they sell of their entire team. The NFL has teams making the playoffs with sub .500 records, so 50% of the season doesn't mean crap for that team.
The UFC holds so many events to give guys exposure and try and build stars. If they didn't we would have never had Anderson Silva because he wouldn't have beaten Chris Leben on free tv and fans would have no idea who he was, therefore he wouldn't have won the vote for the title shot, would have had 4-5 more obscure fights before getting a title shot and then wouldn't have had the record title run and exposure he did.
These articles are written, even when guys get paid to follow MMA, by idiots, people trying to bring down MMA so that they can move up into other sports reporting or others who just want to hurt the UFC for personal gain. They are people with no knowledge of sports, economics or building anything, they just have they crappy english degree from a 3rd rate online college that they cry to every night.
The UFC adds new fighters because thats how you build champions. Are they suppose to have a roster of 20 guys and just sign a new person every time they have a title shot?
Go through an NBA season, how many games actually matter, like really? 10-15? Half the games are played at 10% with the last 20 seconds only counting. Same with the NHL, more than 50% of the teams make the playoffs, which means almost the entire regular season doesn't matter. Baseball, out of 30 teams there are 5-6 out of it within the first week, hell they've been out of it for months, another 4-5 are done by the allstar break and they sell of their entire team. The NFL has teams making the playoffs with sub .500 records, so 50% of the season doesn't mean crap for that team.
The UFC holds so many events to give guys exposure and try and build stars. If they didn't we would have never had Anderson Silva because he wouldn't have beaten Chris Leben on free tv and fans would have no idea who he was, therefore he wouldn't have won the vote for the title shot, would have had 4-5 more obscure fights before getting a title shot and then wouldn't have had the record title run and exposure he did.
These articles are written, even when guys get paid to follow MMA, by idiots, people trying to bring down MMA so that they can move up into other sports reporting or others who just want to hurt the UFC for personal gain. They are people with no knowledge of sports, economics or building anything, they just have they crappy english degree from a 3rd rate online college that they cry to every night.
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So the D League players are getting by on 13K a year?
Salaries remain flat: $25,500, $19,000 and $13,000 for the league's three player classifications. Which means D-League players are virtually playing for free -- and a modest per diem on the road of $40
Unless my math is off that's about $6 an hour for a 40 hour/week job for the lowest level...isn't that less than minimum?
It's because people are too dumb to see what these events are, they are greedy and want every event to be 3 title fights and a super fight, instead of a chance to see good fights. Many of the guys trying to make names for themselves fight harder than a guy protecting a belt, but "fans" don't care to see good fights, they care to watch a name, thats all.
Just think if the UFC didn't have events like this, i mean look at this Fight Night 5 card and the bums the UFC bored us to death with. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFC_Ultimate_Fight_Night_5 I mean look at that crappy undercard with unknown fighters, those guys will be gone from the UFC within days. Not a single guy on that card was a star, they were TUF losers and guys the UFC got from over seas that only 1/1,000th of the people watching knew.
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Couldn't have said it better. Well done.
He wasn't basing his statement off facts, he was just spouting Dana hate like most idiots. Outside of first round draft picks in the NBA and NFL, if you're not actively on a Pro team you're not surviving on just playing sports.
Hell lets compare the UFC to the MLB. The UFC is 20 years old or so and it's champions are making millions. At 60 years old the MLB's champions and biggest stars were working in the offseason. Yogi Berra and Phil Rizzuto, two of the greatest players of their generation, on the biggest team in all sports at the time, one with 10 world series rings and the other with 7, worked at a men's suit store here in NJ in the offseason because playing Pro baseball for the biggest team didn't pay enough to survive, and they were playing 150 (not sure if it was 162 yet) games a a year and had another 2 months of training. The best UFC prospect fights 2-3 times a year and trains 2 3 hour sessions a day, not saying they don't put in tons of work, but it wasn't as much as these guys put in.
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This is all true, because MLB owners were screwing the players then just like the UFC screws it's fighters now. It wasn't until baseball players unionized that they started actually getting a decent cut of the money.
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lol, oh so true. When the UFC banks a few billion a year like the NFL and has a multibillion dollar TV deal then let's talk fat contracts for the fighters...the Fox TV deal is worth 100 million a year. Not chump change but far from billions. All that gives them is a little breathing room to keep things going until the real money comes in.
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Totally missed his point didn't you? He said the biggest MLB stars were working off season jobs. Pretty sure I saw a picture of GSP (retired) getting ready to swim off Monaco with a friend. Also sure I saw Koscheck's house, airplane, cars and bikes on an MMA clip...and he's not exactly a star.
So let's not get all huffy about MMA fighters being screwed.
To a point, but even with the union in place players weren't making the money they are now, even when compensating for inflation. With collective bargaining in sports, where nothing is collective and every player makes their own deal, the Union's only power is to negotiate shared percentages from Memorabilia and TV deals, they're main power is to protect the players image, but when it comes down to contracts they have little say in what a person makes (I'm not in sports but i'm part of a very similar union and see how little they actually do when it comes to helping the workers and what they make)
What raised the value of all sports contracts were TV deals. That is the difference between what UFC fighters make and other sports make. Between PPV, Fight Pass and Fox the UFC makes $300-400 Mil a year, that was even a high estimate when someone here on Sherdog tried to break it down. Only $100 Mil from Fox is guaranteed for the next 5 years, PPV money fluctuates by PPV and what each champion's cut is.
On the other hand the MLB is bringing in over $1.5 Billion from only 3 sources, Fox, ESPN and TBS, and those are for a very small number of games. Fox plays maybe 100 a year out of 2500 games and most are playoffs, same with TBS and ESPN. Many teams like the Yankees or Boston have their own Networks with huge deals in place, so players are getting their share of a nearly $3 Billion a year pool, thats where the majority of their money comes from.
The NFL is able to pay huge signing and guaranteed contracts because they bring in $5+ Bil a year for an even smaller number of games, that was what their last strike was about and why salaries went up again, they wanted a 1% bump in pay, and thats what the union fought for.
The UFC will never be able to pay all their guys even close to what other sports pay because they don't have the revenue. Fans scream and shout and act like they even have a smidgen of knowledge about economics when they try and add up PPV buys and say fighters aren't paid enough, but they don't come close to the big picture.
The best way to compare the UFC is to compare them with a similar sport in the UFC in revenue and life span, the MLS. Currently on the NY Team, a team with the most exposure. They have 2 players making $3.5 Mil both international superstars, 1 making over $300K, 4 over 200K, 7 making over 100K and 7 making under $40K with one at $10K. This is how it is for all teams, this is the salary for an entire year. Compare that with a year for an MMA fighter, who may fight 3 times, not play 30 games, and they even out, hell the UFC might even be above when bonuses come into play.
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That is such a ridiculous attempt. Please put it in the context of the times. That is before sports unions, and a bunch of other shit. That's like saying it's amazing that Apple is paying its workers now, what it took Kodak 50 years to pay. No, standards were raised across the board. No major sports league could get away with treating players like that. It isn't the mid or early 20th century.
And yet as I continued my post below I show you how the MLS, a league similar in age and revenue to the UFC, does worse than that.
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The average MLS player is making 150,000 a year. I doubt it is worse. We don't have numbers, but I would bet that the MLS players get a greater share of revenue, than UFC fighters do.
