UFC finally agrees to huge payout after near decade long class-action suit
There are a lot of people out there that talk about how UFC is a monopoly and as such, they engage in actions that don't allow for competition in the industry and are also not really required to pay honest pay for honest work to their fighters. As , by far, the largest promotion in MMA, they can pay whatever they want and have the attitude of "if you don't like it, there's the door."
Some people will point at the immense payouts of certain well-known fighters and use that as a method of attempting to prove the UFC does pay well, but you can't judge the overall pay-scheme of an organization as a reflection of their overall policy. Hell, even the biggest names such as Conor McGregor have made a relatively low amount of money in fight purses compared to other sports over the same time period. When you get to the names that are out of the top-20, these people are barely making a living and in many instances they have to have other jobs just to supplement their time spent in the sport.
A lot of this discussion of limiting fighter pay was brought about when UFC decided that they were going to determine the companies that fighters were allowed to seek promotion from rather than allowing the fighters to seek these out on their own. I remember those days when people would come to the octagon with a poster behind them that showed all the sponsors they had found and it was kind of funny in a way because the lower down on the totem pole a person was, the more obscure the sponsors would become.
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The fighters would also have their own sponsors on their shorts and warm-up shirt and while it certainly had the opportunity to be kind of ugly, it was a great incentive for fighters to seek out their own paydays if they felt so compelled. It also gave even lower guys and opportunity to be a full-time fighter without much in the way of worries as to how they were going to pay their rent. Then came the day when UFC banned all of this and the only sponsors allowed were the ones UFC obtained on their own. These contracts had much larger money amounts involved but it was for the most part, up to UFC how much of the sponsorship they were going to allow each of the fighters to have and again, this depended on how well the fighter performed and how high up in the rankings they were. This is when we kind of entered the era of people attempting to make a name for themselves by pulling WWE style tactics rather than just being the best and most entertaining fighter they could be.
One of the most damming statistics I saw recently was that while fighters still have a chance at the best payouts in UFC, it is mostly because of the fact that UFC is so huge that none of the other promotions really have a chance to grow. If you get too big, UFC simply buys all your best talent or just buys the entire organization and absorbs it. The fighters themselves have almost no say in how any of this goes down. Also, over the years all organizations, including UFC, saw increases in over fighter pay as a percentage of how much the company makes. UFC's growth for fighter pay compared to company earnings made it to a mere 16% whereas Bellator pays nearly 60% of earnings to the fighters.
Companies are allowed to pay whatever they want in this sort of thing but when it becomes evident that the company in question is engaged in unfair competition in the market by being big enough to simply "eat" any competing organization, that's when the government gets involved.
Initially the Le v. Zuffa suit was filed in 2014 and Zuffa (the parent company of UFC) moved to have the lawsuit dismissed very early on but this was denied by judges. If you ever thought that the legal system was rigged in favor of the rich I want you to take a minute and try to think about how unimaginably expensive continuing this same lawsuit for nearly 10 years has been for the plaintiffs. I haven't had much to do with lawyers in my life but the few times I did I just felt completely ripped off by the system. Now imagine that you are in a lawsuit against the largest MMA company in the world that is worth billions and trying to keep a lawyer working for you over the course of 10 years while the big company is intentionally dragging the proceedings out at great cost to both sides. Zuffa is able to absorb these expenses because they probably have a ton of lawyers on their permanent payroll. The little guys, well I don't understand the specifics of how they kept their lawyers around but much like most class-action lawsuits, it is probably because the lawyers are going to end up with more of the payout money than the people with the grievance are.
In the past week Zuffa finally agreed to a payout on this lawsuit, to the tune of $375 million. An absolutely massive amount of money to the average Joe but I wouldn't be surprised if Zuffa simply decided to pay this because their lawyers had told them there is a chance that they could lose dramatically more if they were to lose in a jury-trial.
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Dana will be asked about this every time he is front of a camera or at a presser for the next few months, no doubt... and he will give his usual annoyed smirk before giving a non-answer. We need to keep in mind that Dana isn't the one truly pulling the strings here and even he has his masters that he has to answer to.
Zuffa and UFC are unlikely to speak about this happening at all because while them making the payout is a sort of admission of guilt, there are no-doubt going to be a lot of non-disclosure agreements as well as insurance that this sort of trial cannot be brought against them again in the future. I don't know how the law works, but I know how arrogant UFC and Zuffa are, so they wouldn't have paid this money out unless they absolutely had to.
This ruling hasn't been finalized as of yet and Zuffa and their attorneys are not commenting on how they feel about it publicly. In short, this isn't over yet. Zuffa has agreed to it though and there are just a few more steps that remain before the money is distributed to more than 1,000 ex UFC fighters. Well, after the lawyers that represented them take the lion's share that is.