“I think it’s going to take off some leverage for the big names to have an argument to negotiate more money,” former welterweight champion, Georges St-Pierre, told Covers. “It could be good for the UFC, as a promoter, terrible for the fighters because when I was competing I was able to have a great argument to negotiate on my contract. I could tell the UFC, ‘Hey, if you want me to do all the promotion, I want to become a partner. I want a piece of the pie to negotiate a part of the pay-per-view revenue. Because if I’m doing all the promotion, I’m helping you, but you need to help me. You need to make me a partner.’ So it might be a bad thing for the fighters in a way that they have less leverage.”
Eliminating (or dramatically reducing) the PPV model means top stars will lose PPV points, a financial incentive that awarded bigger payouts for high-performing fight cards. Whether or not the promotion will replace those bonuses with something equally rewarding remains to be seen, but UFC veteran Matt Brown warns fighters against “getting their hopes up.”
“They don’t have to pay fighters more,” Brown told MMA Fighting. “They do not. I promise you that. They will get away with it. So just recognizing that, you can make your own decision if you want to call your Congressman or whatever to try and fix this. But that is what the facts of the case are. There’s no counterbalance. The UFC does what they want, when they want, how they want, as big as they want and nobody is saying ‘hey motherf*cker what about us?’ It just the facts of the matter. It just needs to happen. There needs to be a counterbalance. There’s no historical stats saying anything is going to change. If you’re a fighter, don’t get your hopes up.”
“What you have to realize if you’re not going to do anything about it, you’re essentially a Roman gladiator, like one of the slaves,” Brown continued. “You may not feel that way because you got to pay your house off, because you’re driving a f*cking Mercedes. Because you’re wearing nicer clothes than you ever have before. You’re not actually living in the pit or whatever, in the Roman days but that is what you are. The emperor is there and he can cut your head off any time he wants. He can send you back to the farm any time he wants. That is literally what we are as fighters.”
