Reebok Sponsorship deal - Good or Bad by the numbers

Players play for the scholarships and exposure to someday get to Pro ball...(do you know how much an NBA benchwarmer earns?) it's like LHW & HW champ money.

I think the thread topic is sponsorship deals, based on viewership of the product.
 
I'd bet all my vcash that the Notre Dame annual viewership >40M. ONE major college football team is the same size as the entire UFC. 13 Million people watched Notre Dame play FSU last year. Talk to me when the UFC has 13 Million view Fight Night.

Talk to me when ND is only available via PPV.
 
You're wrong here and you just made my point.

UFC as an ENTIRE organization is just as valuable to advertisers as single teams in other sports.

They just aren't that big.

What was I wrong about - I pointed out that he had overstated the ASU deal, relative to other schools. Then I pointed out that UFC is the entire org but ASU isn't the entire org and so comparing them makes little sense. I then finished with stating the neither the UFC nor Reebok got screwed in this deal, only the fighters did.

Saying someone is wrong doesn't make it true just because you don't like what they said, lol.

To put it another way: In a UFC match, Reebok is sponsoring both sides of the fight. In a football game, Adidas is only sponsoring one side of the match. They would have to pay another large amount of money to sponsor both contestants. That's why the choice of comparisons are imperfect.
 
Players play for the scholarships and exposure to someday get to Pro ball...(do you know how much an NBA benchwarmer earns?) it's like LHW & HW champ money.

Minimum wage just to get on a practice squad is about 250k a year.

They don't play for exposure, only like .001% get into the NFL or NBA...at Syracuse, they played for a free education. A few of the players have showed up just for a year or so because they made it mandatory...before that people were just going right from high school...but the NCAA was losing WAYY too much money...so they pulled some strings, made some donations, and VOILA! Now the NCAA has a steady crop of stars coming in for just 1 or 2 years. If they didn't NCAA sports would be dying! It really has nothing to do with the players, its all about the $$$. Of the millions of kids out there that want to be a pro athlete, how many of them make it? If you wanna be a UFC fighter, basically just quit your job and train for a few years. I lived in Coconut Creek and spent time at ATT. They would have NFL and MLB guys come in and they were 10x the athletes that UFC guys were when it came to strength and conditioning...technique can be learned easily. MMA is still minor league, no matter what we say. Saying college players are after exposure is like saying Olympic wrestlers are doing it for the money, and the chance to get into MMA...
 
Talk to me when ND is only available via PPV.

More people watched the debate last week on Fox news. 40 million for a whole season?

Keep in mind, Rush Limbaugh has an average of about 25 million listeners. And these aren't the poor demographic that the UFC aim for. Ever wonder why no one knows what UFC/MMA is? Yet everyone knows what MLB/NFL/NBA are?
 
The biggest problem with the Reebok deal is that it chased off a large portion of sponsor money for most of the fighters.

Fighters with decent levels of sponsorship were suddenly eating a big pay cut because those sponsors weren't willing to be sponsors w/out the TV exposure.

When Miesha and Schaub and others are saying they're losing over 1/2 their money from the deal that is non-trivial. Stitch mentioned that most/all fighters are unhappy with the deal and he gets immediately sacked.

If they can get other sponsors onboard with the framework - Paying fighters based on experience then it might not be such a shitstorm.

If you're getting 10-15k from Reebok and 5-10k from Harley Davidson and 5-10k from Monster and 5-10k from Alienware and....

You get the idea.
 
I'd bet all my vcash that the Notre Dame annual viewership >40M. ONE major college football team is the same size as the entire UFC. 13 Million people watched Notre Dame play FSU last year. Talk to me when the UFC has 13 Million view Fight Night.

You missed my point. My point was that the ASU deal isn't the second largest in college football. It's only the second largest in the PAC-12 among public universities. I presented Notre Dame so that you could see the range that per year deals were going up to.

And as for Notre Dame vs. FSU, Under Armor is splitting the viewership with whomever sponsors FSU's apparel. In a UFC match, Reebok is sponsoring both sides for the same amount of money.

So sponsoring ASU for approximately the same as the UFC while being forced to share screen time with another apparel rival means that Adidas is getting half the value that Reebok is.

It's still a good deal for Reebok and the UFC but it's not comparable to the ASU deal.
 
I think the thread topic is sponsorship deals, based on viewership of the product.

Adidas shelled out $$$ for the eyeball knowing it's sponsoring an entity. Let's say Reebok did the same thing.
Did ASU act the same way UFC did? Remember, Every College & University send out scholarship grants to athletes, that includes allowances (not salary). UFC offers livelyhood to contractors...tweaks the contract so that it would dis-include managers and agents (who in Dana's own words get a piece of the fighter's pay) so let's not include them. He Managed to do it but it seems like that piece didn't go to the fighters themselves...
 
The biggest problem with the Reebok deal is that it chased off a large portion of sponsor money for most of the fighters.

Fighters with decent levels of sponsorship were suddenly eating a big pay cut because those sponsors weren't willing to be sponsors w/out the TV exposure.

When Miesha and Schaub and others are saying they're losing over 1/2 their money from the deal that is non-trivial. Stitch mentioned that most/all fighters are unhappy with the deal and he gets immediately sacked.

If they can get other sponsors onboard with the framework - Paying fighters based on experience then it might not be such a shitstorm.

If you're getting 10-15k from Reebok and 5-10k from Harley Davidson and 5-10k from Monster and 5-10k from Alienware and....

You get the idea
.

That would be ideal but those companies you mentioned already advertise with the UFC. I don't see Zuffa taking a cut from those sponsors and handing it to the fighters. They haven't yet.
 
What was I wrong about - I pointed out that he had overstated the ASU deal, relative to other schools. Then I pointed out that UFC is the entire org but ASU isn't the entire org and so comparing them makes little sense. I then finished with stating the neither the UFC nor Reebok got screwed in this deal, only the fighters did.

Saying someone is wrong doesn't make it true just because you don't like what they said, lol.

To put it another way: In a UFC match, Reebok is sponsoring both sides of the fight. In a football game, Adidas is only sponsoring one side of the match. They would have to pay another large amount of money to sponsor both contestants. That's why the choice of comparisons are imperfect.

You're still glossing over my main point.


The entirety of the UFC is worth less to advertisers than single college teams. Let's not even talk about the major leagues.

That would be ideal but those companies you mentioned already advertise with the UFC. I don't see Zuffa taking a cut from those sponsors and handing it to the fighters. They haven't yet.

Where do you think the money they pay the fighters from comes from? Thin air?

The money fighters get paid now comes from those sponsors, the distribution of that money just isn't public or as structured as the Reebok deal.
 
You're still glossing over my main point.


The entirety of the UFC is worth less to advertisers than single college teams. Let's not even talk about the major leagues.

I don't really care about your main point. I was responding to the OP, not you. I appreciate that you took the time to read my post but I hadn't read yours...and I still haven't.

No offense intended.
 
They should just amend the deal and allow fighters to put ads from sponsors on the Reebok gear. That way Reebok will still be the brand of the company and fighters will still get other sponsor revenue.
 
What was I wrong about - I pointed out that he had overstated the ASU deal, relative to other schools. Then I pointed out that UFC is the entire org but ASU isn't the entire org and so comparing them makes little sense. I then finished with stating the neither the UFC nor Reebok got screwed in this deal, only the fighters did.

Saying someone is wrong doesn't make it true just because you don't like what they said, lol.

To put it another way: In a UFC match, Reebok is sponsoring both sides of the fight. In a football game, Adidas is only sponsoring one side of the match. They would have to pay another large amount of money to sponsor both contestants. That's why the choice of comparisons are imperfect.

I think the fact that UFC and Reebok did not get screwed and the fighters did is a lot of what people are complaining about.
 
It's a great deal.....for REEBOK. They have exclusive in cage deals with Ronda and Conor, not to mention every other single potential star that could become bigger than the sport. Usually large apparel companies are shelling out 10 million + a year for one single athlete. They get all of them. College athletic money goes towards scholarships, recruitment, and paying administration. A college athlete who doesn't become a professional (99% of them won't) will still have a degree and hypothetically be able to find a career to support themselves. UFC fighters have no pension, risk brain damage, and still have to train at a professional level to not get killed in the cage. In no way can this be compared to non professional athletes who don't get paid, who won't suffer life altering physical damage (football is rapidly changing because of this reality), and who will be moving on to a new line of work after their senior year.
 
You don't have any idea how it works. They pay exactly depending on how much the contractors and employees make. The NFL gets more per "eyeball" than the UFC, it isn't even comparable. But then, I have spent my life working in advertising and marketing with companies like Nike, and Adidas. So I can't expect some random sherdog keyboard warrior, who is probably not even out of high school, to understand something so complicated. This is not a black and white issue. Why does everyone act like it is? The bottom line, UFC fighters got screwed. The ONLY reason this deal was signed was because a. Zuffa brass gets paid, best way for them to cut out the 3rd party sponsors and managers and get a piece of the action b. the fighters had no say in it.

In a sport like NFL, the player union would have a huge say in this and they would never agree to something like this. Here, Dana White cried and whined how the managers were screwing fighters and this would fix it. So now they made it so that is not a problem, and they still get a big piece of any contract that a UFC fighter can sign. Double dipping, and screwing the fighters out of every penny they can. Such an evil bastard.

I think all the legal trouble coming is going to be the bane of Dana. He is going to step down, and Bellaforce will grow, while UFC becomes more and more stagnant. About 140 days left in the year, and I have not been impressed by anything UFC has done. Biggest show of the year, and people were talking about drama with WSoF. What do they have left? The last 3rd of the year is going to be slow for MMA it seems.

Are you advocating for a fighters union?
 
Talk to me when ND is only available via PPV.
why? I'm using the larger viewership number for UFC of cable TV. PPV is a subset of the cable views. Don't want to double count views.
 
In MMA we just have a corrupt bunch of mobsters running a fight promotion where 99% of the fighters are nothing but a statistic. Reebok wasn't good for any of the fighters, don't believe the propaganda. The fighters look terrible, and uncomfortable...the stuff is ill fitting, generic, and looks like everyone wearing the same dumb shorts...WAYY too much white. I wouldn't be caught dead in one of those weird looking "kits"
If Reebok gave me my choice of free kits, and offered to pay me to wear them, I wouldn't consider it. How come when the colleges sign a contract and the new gear goes out, they make stuff that looks good that people want to wear. With the UFC they took 5 minutes to make the most generic, low quality crap I have ever seen in a pro sport. Makes it look amateaur..and furthermore, the Octagon and having every square inch of it covered with more ads makes the whole discussion just jump to a new level of hypocrisy.

This is because of the fundamental difference between these kits and other athletic apparel. Fighters don't fight in kits, other than the shorts. And for the most part, shorts are pretty generic. In other sports, athletes have to perform in the apparel - basketball jerseys, football jerseys, swimwear - they all have a potential impact on performance.

But MMA? They're shirtless and shoeless. Where's the performance component of the attire? Reebok bought what the UFC was selling, ad space. In other sports, it's both ad space and performance requirements at issue.
 
You missed my point. My point was that the ASU deal isn't the second largest in college football.
I might not have phrased it well, but it's the second largest college football sponsorship deal for Adidas. There is obviously a formula of what a view is worth in terms of branded apparel sponsorship and the reebok deal is near the high end of the formula at 26 1/2 cents per view I'm taking an educated guess that some factor of UFC growth is built into this deal or Reebok would have offered less. Adidas is paying ASU 22 cents a view. The previous deal with Nike was for $2M dollars LESS per year. 22 cent a view is at a premium to the market and I don't think ASU football viewership is going to grow significantly over the next 8 years. The more I analyze this deal the more I think three things:

1. Reebok is counting on BIG UFC growth.
2. The UFC got a sweetheart deal.
3. Reebok is overpaying to gain some sort of foothold vs. Adidas and Nike in the US market.
 
I might not have phrased it well, but it's the second largest college football sponsorship deal for Adidas. There is obviously a formula of what a view is worth in terms of branded apparel sponsorship and the reebok deal is near the high end of the formula at 26 1/2 cents per view I'm taking an educated guess that some factor of UFC growth is built into this deal or Reebok would have offered less. Adidas is paying ASU 22 cents a view. The previous deal with Nike was for $2M dollars LESS per year. 22 cent a view is at a premium to the market and I don't think ASU football viewership is going to grow significantly over the next 8 years. The more I analyze this deal the more I think three things:

1. Reebok is counting on BIG UFC growth.
2. The UFC got a sweetheart deal.
3. Reebok is overpaying to gain some sort of foothold vs. Adidas and Nike in the US market.

There's no basis for the comparison. The deal is second in the PAC-12 among public universities. That means that it could be a mid-level Pac-12 deal because of the private universities. We don't know what the other Conferences are getting for their deals. So, it's a stretch to say it's towards the high end with so little known.

My second point is that you're comparing the views in a way that doesn't make sense. In a football game, ASU is half of the match so Adidas is not the exclusive sponsor during any ASU game. They are sharing sponsorship time with the sponsor of the other team - nike, Reebok, Adidas. In the UFC deal, Reebok is the exclusive apparel sponsor for the entire broadcast - both fighters.

For the comparisons to be valid, you'd have to know what it would cost Adidas to sponsor the apparel for both teams. Exclusivity for the broadcast.
 
There's no basis for the comparison. The deal is second in the PAC-12 among public universities. That means that it could be a mid-level Pac-12 deal because of the private universities. We don't know what the other Conferences are getting for their deals. So, it's a stretch to say it's towards the high end with so little known.

My second point is that you're comparing the views in a way that doesn't make sense. In a football game, ASU is half of the match so Adidas is not the exclusive sponsor during any ASU game. They are sharing sponsorship time with the sponsor of the other team - nike, Reebok, Adidas. In the UFC deal, Reebok is the exclusive apparel sponsor for the entire broadcast - both fighters.

For the comparisons to be valid, you'd have to know what it would cost Adidas to sponsor the apparel for both teams. Exclusivity for the broadcast.

I agree on the one point - exclusivity for Reebok for the uniform is worth something, that has actual value as they don't have to compete with another vendor. But I disagree on the view comparison. Views are views, it doesn't matter what other ads are being presented.
 
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