Schaub, Jon Anik and Florian go at it regarding fighter pay on podcast

[pyork64]

I can't believe I'm saying this AGAIN. But I'm with Schaub on this one.

Private company? WTF is that sh*t?

How do they pay taxes if no one knows what they make?

Let me break it down for you. Just because the government needs to know something for tax purposes does not make it public information. For example, your personal taxes, the government knows what you make but you are not obligated to tell anyone else what you make. A private company will work the same way with respect to this; they do not need to make financial information public because their stock is not offered to the public. Make sense?

 

[JonesBones]

Schaub isn't bound by groupthink, no wonder Sherdog always hated him.

 

[KantoTerror]

Right, I'm a UFC shill who tells people UFC 194 isn't worth buying.

Keep resorting to ad hominem though because it's not like you can actually argue for a point.

just because you pointed out UFC 194 is a crappy event doesn't mean you're not a shill...

 

[JonesBones]

What some people like Schaub, seem to miss is that in the NHL, NBA and NFL the athletes didn't get paid like they do now. If we take look at the UFC as having started in 1993 and the Unified rules ie Modern UFC being established in 2000 that like looking at the NHL circa 1900, the NFL about the same and the NBA maybe the 1940-50's which is actually before the NBA. The UFC is moving towards being a bit of a hybrid between pure prize fighting as boxing has been for ever and a league sport. The champions and popular name fighters will always get a giant piece of the pie relative to the other fighters on the roster but I believe that Zuffa is trying to pay guys more to raise the base level.

Zuffa needs greater control over the entire product to get it to the level of the major sports. Having Condom Depot on fighters asses is laughable. Dynamic Fastener and other silly sponsors, while nice for the fighter getting the extra cash doesn't help the image of the UFC and the sport overall.

Its a debate over the needs of the individual who wants every penny he can get in the short run over the needs of the organization who wants the business to grow over the long run.

This is a weak argument. Google and Apple started after Kodak too. You simply can't get away with those business practices in this day and age. You are essentially saying that the UFC has a mentality from decades past. That's the fucking problem. That shit doesn't fly in any business in this age. The whole world has caught up, not just fucking sports. The more scrutiny the UFC gets, the more it will fall apart.

 

[Malthian]

Its a debate over the needs of the individual who wants every penny he can get in the short run over the needs of the organization who wants the business to grow over the long run.

This.

People need to put themselves in the shoes of a business owner. If you own a business, you have only two goals. Grow the business and make a profit. Your goal is not to pay your employees more than they "deserve", and "deserve" is defined as what the market will bear.

Let's say you open a restaurant and you're looking for a cook. If the restaurant down the street pays $15/hour, you might offer to pay $15 if you want to match the market, or if you want to make the job more attractive you might offer $17 or $18 per hour. You certainly aren't going to go out of your way to offer $30/hour even if you feel that $18/hour is a low wage relative to the total cost of living.

The fighters on the other hand are looking exclusively at cashing out the most they can. They care about the sport, but only insofar as it doesn't interfere significantly with their paychecks. If you're a fighter, you couldn't care less if you pave the road for higher fighter pay 10 years down the line, you want to be paid now even if it's at the cost of organizational growth or investor profit margins.

The real issue here is not that the UFC is evil or the fighters are being screwed, it's that the vast majority fighters don't have any leverage in this discussion. The fighters that actually DO have leverage (the ones that sell PPV's and tickets) are being compensated based upon that leverage. That's why Rousey and Shogun don't make $10k/$10k but instead get compensated far more.

And comparisons to "team sports" as a financial baseline is a misguided analogy. Team sports do not function in the same way as individual sports. What fighter 508 does has NO bearing on what the top draw fighters do. Heck, the champions and top 5 fighters aren't even going to fight the 20th ranked fighter in their division so they don't even require them for purposes of fight making.

There's 500+ fighters on the roster, and the ONLY reason that the UFC keeps fighters outside of the top 15 on their roster is for the purpose of filling content for their 40+ shows per year. If the McGregor's and Rousey's of the organization are the superstar sales people, then the 500th fighter is the equivalent of a cashier. They have a purpose, but they're eminently replaceable.

Let's be honest, would any of us even notice if the UFC picked a random person out of the amateur circuit and put them on the fight pass prelim versus who's there now? Would any of us even care?

That's the problem. Those fighters have a very low intrinsic value to the organization so arguing that they "deserve" some standard of earnings when it is already significantly higher than what is being offered by every other organization is not realistic.

 

[antithetic]

No worries your job is safe for now Anik.

 

[TFanatic]

Schaub isn't bound by groupthink, no wonder Sherdog always hated him.

Yeah, that's why people dislike Schaub. He's just TOO REAL for everyone!!!

 

[antithetic]

^^ as real as it gets.

 

[Moezao]

I will stop you right there. How many days per year do soccer players player soccer with their jerseys on? How many days per year do fighters have to fight with their Reebok uniform on.

Let's not even begin to mention how football is a completely different beast compared to a fringe sport like MMA. Your "analogy" is completely invalid.

Here's a fact for you to consider: nearly 40% of the private wealth in the US is held by 1% of its population. That shows you how things work in general. The UFC isn't doing anything out of the ordinary. These fighters need to deal with it, or make the changes for themselves. Dana White said no WMMA in the UFC ever, Rousey went out there and changed that. In comparison, "Captain America" Tim Kenney runs around and whines about the Reebok deal on podcasts.

I don't understand why you keep bringing in Tim Kennedy, but okay.

And the fact that UFC fighters have an average of 2 fights per year is another reason why their pay should be better. I honestly think that if the pay was better we'd have much bigger talent pool, especially at the heavier weight classes. If I'm a good athlete MMA would never be my first choice just because the pay sucks, especially if you take into account the amount of damage you take throughout a fighter's carreer.

I agree that, of course, football is a much bigger and popular sport. I wasn't comparing the sports, I was just putting what you said in another perspective. Just because someone is organizing an event doesn't mean they can have all the money or make one sides decisions like that.

The UFC organizes the event, they don't own the fighters. Hell, they're not even employees. It's not fair that they make fighters wear uniforms. And ugly ones at that.

And how is the existence of a huge wealth inequality a valid argument? We're supposed to fight it, not embrace it.

 

[DetroitRob]

I can't believe I'm saying this AGAIN. But I'm with Schaub on this one.

Private company? WTF is that sh*t?

How do they pay taxes if no one knows what they make?

Business 101 lesson

Private Companies do not report their earnings publically. Publically traded companies do. Until the UFC offers public stock offerings they are not obligated to announce their earnings. As a private business owner myself I do not have to release that information publically but you can bet your ass the IRS knows where every penny we make goes even bonuses to my employees

Seriously, do you think the UFC can not report how much they give away to fighters and get away with it? You must be pretty young and not dealt with the IRS in any fashion.

The UFC has to account for every dollar on their taxes. It is not a guesstimate, it is all on paper.

 

[Moezao]

This.

People need to put themselves in the shoes of a business owner. If you own a business, you have only two goals. Grow the business and make a profit. Your goal is not to pay your employees more than they "deserve", and "deserve" is defined as what the market will bear.

Let's say you open a restaurant and you're looking for a cook. If the restaurant down the street pays $15/hour, you might offer to pay $15 if you want to match the market, or if you want to make the job more attractive you might offer $17 or $18 per hour. You certainly aren't going to go out of your way to offer $30/hour even if you feel that $18/hour is a low wage relative to the total cost of living.

The fighters on the other hand are looking exclusively at cashing out the most they can. They care about the sport, but only insofar as it doesn't interfere significantly with their paychecks. If you're a fighter, you couldn't care less if you pave the road for higher fighter pay 10 years down the line, you want to be paid now even if it's at the cost of organizational growth or investor profit margins.

The real issue here is not that the UFC is evil or the fighters are being screwed, it's that the vast majority fighters don't have any leverage in this discussion. The fighters that actually DO have leverage (the ones that sell PPV's and tickets) are being compensated based upon that leverage. That's why Rousey and Shogun don't make $10k/$10k but instead get compensated far more.

And comparisons to "team sports" as a financial baseline is a misguided analogy. Team sports do not function in the same way as individual sports. What fighter 508 does has NO bearing on what the top draw fighters do. Heck, the champions and top 5 fighters aren't even going to fight the 20th ranked fighter in their division so they don't even require them for purposes of fight making.

There's 500+ fighters on the roster, and the ONLY reason that the UFC keeps fighters outside of the top 15 on their roster is for the purpose of filling content for their 40+ shows per year. If the McGregor's and Rousey's of the organization are the superstar sales people, then the 500th fighter is the equivalent of a cashier. They have a purpose, but they're eminently replaceable.

Let's be honest, would any of us even notice if the UFC picked a random person out of the amateur circuit and put them on the fight pass prelim versus who's there now? Would any of us even care?

That's the problem. Those fighters have a very low intrinsic value to the organization so arguing that they "deserve" some standard of earnings when it is already significantly higher than what is being offered by every other organization is not realistic.

I agree that a lot of fighters simply don't have any appeal yet and shouldn't get a lot of money.

But then we have fighters like Rory, for instance, he's got appeal and got paid 59,000 to get completely busted up in one of the best recent fights. I'll not consider any locker room bonus because they're undisclosed. And let's suppose he got dominated by Robbie and therefore got no bonus. Would it be fair?

 

[The_Renaissance]

just because you pointed out UFC 194 is a crappy event doesn't mean you're not a shill...

Aldo/CM
Weidman/Rockhold
Jacare/Romero


If that's a crappy card I seriously mean this, you, me and every single poster on this board needs to close our accounts down and stop watching and discussing MMA. Full stop. That is a sick card, so far. One of the best we've ever seen.

 

[FlyThaiMMA]

Apparently "I love the UFC" = "I love bitching about the UFC non stop"

I thought Brendan is doing well selling T shirts. Why so bitter and butthurt?

Tim Kennedy, Brendan Schaub...all these people bitching about the Reebok sponsorship always fail to mention that NOBODY is stopping them from getting extra sponsors. The UFC literally only requires them to wear Reebok like what, 6 days out of every year? For crying out loud, quit whining and go get as many sponsors as you want for the rest of the year. Ronda Rousey gets apparel sponsors, game sponsors, fast food sponsors, movie deals, said some shit about DNB on a video and next thing you know she's sold 40,000 DNB T-shirts....

If a butterfaced 135 lbs chick with extreme BO can do it, why can't Brendan Schaub? Why can't Tim Kennedy? These whiners need to stop blaming the UFC and Reebok for your own incompetence and do something for themselves. You don't see Ronda Rousey sitting on her ass bitching about the state of WMMA and how it's not even in the UFC in 2011. Don't bitch about the environment, CHANGE the environment. Tim Kenney is supposed to be some special forces badass yet in reality he's mentally weaker than a chick with daddy issues. Weak.

Zuffa paid poster everyone

 

[Codpiece]

This is a weak argument. Google and Apple started after Kodak too. You simply can't get away with those business practices in this day and age. You are essentially saying that the UFC has a mentality from decades past. That's the fucking problem. That shit doesn't fly in any business in this age. The whole world has caught up, not just fucking sports. The more scrutiny the UFC gets, the more it will fall apart.

I don't think that was DSJ's point at all, I think his point was simply that the team sports which have huge revenues and also pay big money to the competitors do so because they are established, have reached market saturation and aren't spending big on expanding, have large and stable fanbases etc., and due to all those factors the division of revenues is very different.

The Reebok deal is bad for fighters right now, because it has lowered most fighters' ability to secure lucrative endorsement deals, but if you look at soccer or NBA for example, their apparel deals are worth huge money. What the UFC has tried to do (and I will not attempt to suggest it did so in the best way) is get into the market where people walk around wearing an Aldo jersey or a Weidman singlet or whatever. That's another potentially huge revenue stream for the fighters and the UFC, if it can be done correctly and if the public are actually interested in such a product.

Fighter pay is still too low for the entry and mid-tier guys. Rory Mac was an example brought up in the interview, that he fought for a base of $59000 after being in the UFC for years, being a top 5 guy in a deep division, with many wins and in a title fight....well that's just not good enough. $10k/$10k is not good enough. But those numbers have increased significantly in the past decade and the trend will hopefully continue.

Of course at no point will any UFC fighter say they are paid well enough and desire no more. Most individuals will do their best to earn more while employed.

 

[MadHouse]

Schaub isn't bound by groupthink, no wonder Sherdog always hated him.

Shaub is just an idiot who wants more money because Floyd,Lebron,Kobe,Brady makes more than him he doesn't care how much the company makes and what its expenses are and that's literally his only argument that those guys make more money than he does

 

[KeepItRealist]

An example of Zuffa's mentality can be seen before the Reebok deal in the sponsor tax that also directly hurt the fighters and in the bonus system:

They wanted to stop having different bonuses for each card and decided to make $50,000 standard. This was less than most non-Fuel TV cards, PPV cards were like $70-80,000 at the time. Why not go up $30,000 instead of down the same amount and give $100,000 for bonuses instead of $50,000? Simple greed. How much would Dana or Lorenzo be financially hurt by something like that?

 

[JDawg9]

I agree that a lot of fighters simply don't have any appeal yet and shouldn't get a lot of money.

But then we have fighters like Rory, for instance, he's got appeal and got paid 59,000 to get completely busted up in one of the best recent fights. I'll not consider any locker room bonus because they're undisclosed. And let's suppose he got dominated by Robbie and therefore got no bonus. Would it be fair?

He signed the contract, he'll make more his next contract.

 

[Mesos]

IRS knows, and has already looked into the ufc.

i don't believe the ufc pays out even close to 30% revenue simply because they don't have to.

shaub makes good points, but anik comes off as an employee trying to talk good about his employer.

also this is prize fighting, its the top guys who bring in money that deserve the largest share. If anyone is, they are the ones screwed the most by the ufc if they underpay guys at all since they have the most to gain or lose otherwise,imo.

Honestly the guys that always whine about pay are usually the ones at the bottom of the division or mid level guys that win some lose some. The top guys never have anything bad to say because they are payed much better for you know, actually being at the top of their division and winning fights. Another complaint that you sometimes here is from guys like aldo who are good fighters but cant sell a ppv to save their life.

 

[MadHouse]

An example of Zuffa's mentality can be seen before the Reebok deal in the sponsor tax that also directly hurt the fighters and in the bonus system:

They wanted to stop having different size $$$ bonuses for each card and decided to make $50,000 standard. And this was less than most non-Fuel TV cards, like $70-80,000 at the time. Why not go up $30,000 instead of down the same amount give $100,000 for bonuses instead of $50,000? Simple greed. How much would Dana or Lorenzo be financially hurt by something like that?

how much they would be financially hurt? take that $100k bonus and multiply by the amount of fights per year and you will get your answer

 

[Malthian]

I don't understand why you keep bringing in Tim Kennedy, but okay.

And the fact that UFC fighters have an average of 2 fights per year is another reason why their pay should be better. I honestly think that if the pay was better we'd have much bigger talent pool, especially at the heavier weight classes. If I'm a good athlete MMA would never be my first choice just because the pay sucks, especially if you take into account the amount of damage you take throughout a fighter's carreer.

I agree that, of course, football is a much bigger and popular sport. I wasn't comparing the sports, I was just putting what you said in another perspective. Just because someone is organizing an event doesn't mean they can have all the money or make one sides decisions like that.

The UFC organizes the event, they don't own the fighters. Hell, they're not even employees. It's not fair that they make fighters wear uniforms. And ugly ones at that.

And how is the existence of a huge wealth inequality a valid argument? We're supposed to fight it, not embrace it.

Just a couple points.

Most fighters fight 2x per year because they CHOOSE to fight only 2x per year. The UFC standard contract (confirmed by Alvarez's contract and interviews from agents/managers that have had fighters go to the UFC) is that the UFC is required to offer 3 matches per year. It is up to each fighter to take or not take those matches. The UFC is only required to OFFER the fights, they don't have to actually MAKE 3 fights per year.

If the UFC offers 3 fights and the fighter turns them all down, then tough luck. They held up their end of the bargain.

Many fighters choose to NOT take more than 2 a year because they are waiting for a better fight. Some are forced to not take 2 per year due to injury of course, but that's not the majority. Some choose to take more.

Cerrone fought 5x in 2011, 2x in 2012, 4x in 2013, 4x in 2014, and has already fought 3x in 2015. In other words, the opportunity to fight more is often there.

Additionally, fighting 2x per year means you're dedicating 20 weeks a year between camps and the actual fight. There's nothing stopping those fighters from taking additional employment such as teaching MA, general side jobs, etc.

Now before people start saying that the UFC is the NFL/MLB/NHL of MMA and should be providing similar compensation, the UFC as an organization is the major leagues, but the entire roster is NOT the major leagues.

The UFC essentially has two tiers of fighters, main card (pros) and prelim fighters (semi-pro). Think of main card fighters as the NFL/NHL/MLB in that they're televised to a wide audience and the athletes, have some level of name recognition and are recognized as the "best".

The rest of the fighters are more like the D-league in the NBA ($30k/year), AAA hockey ($25k-$30K/year) or the CFL ($50K/year minimum). And the UFC is several orders of magnitude less in revenue, viewership than any of the other major sports.

And you are right, the UFC does not own the fighters. Thompson walked as did Koscheck. The reason why more fighters still choose to come to the UFC is that unless you're an already established name then you're simply going to get paid more fighting for the UFC than organizations like ONE FC, Bellator or WSOF.

Now all that doesn't mean that the Reebok deal doesn't suck for the fighters. It does suck for the fighters. However it is within the rights of the UFC to impose uniforms during UFC events. While it's not "fair" to the fighters within the context of them having an outside income stream being taken away, it's not unfair in the sense that the platform provided by the UFC does belong to the UFC.

The main thing now is what's done is done.

The fighters aren't going to get that advertising space back no matter how much they complain. The rights were already signed away in the Reebok deal. The fighters need to worry about what to do next, which is either to negotiate for higher base pay individually or collectively, or to see if they can seek better compensation with another organization, or to seek income streams from other sources outside of their fighting (other jobs, other sponsorships, independent businesses, etc).