I followed the UFC very closely from the 90s onward, and watched as the fighters were happy to be paid literally anything for fighting. This was such a rare thing back then, but of course the ability to be paid has scaled up as the underlying phenomenon (EG, the public's awareness of BJJ and MMA) has grown.
Of course, the level to which the pay has scaled up simply has not kept pace with the company's earnings, and this reminds me of a few other areas where this happens, like banking finance: the federal funds rate will change like a year before banks will even start to raise their interest rates.
Those early days were incredible, and the sport has become more and more commercial and watered down since those days, and I'm generally bored by modern MMA, but those fighters deserve to be better taken care of.
UFC also took away ability for fighters to wear their own sponsors/special ring entrances to squeeze out fighter earnings (they give those spots to sponsors now). It's a mess
Sad to hear, but at least this is on the radar of some folks today. It was really tough to raise awareness of how poorly the fighters were paid before the UFC was a publicly traded company, and certainly back during the "dark era", where you could only watch events if you had satellite TV (or a very good tape-trading connection).
I followed the UFC very closely from the 90s onward, and watched as the fighters were happy to be paid literally anything for fighting. This was such a rare thing back then, but of course the ability to be paid has scaled up as the underlying phenomenon (EG, the public's awareness of BJJ and MMA) has grown.
Of course, the level to which the pay has scaled up simply has not kept pace with the company's earnings, and this reminds me of a few other areas where this happens, like banking finance: the federal funds rate will change like a year before banks will even start to raise their interest rates.
Those early days were incredible, and the sport has become more and more commercial and watered down since those days, and I'm generally bored by modern MMA, but those fighters deserve to be better taken care of.
UFC also took away ability for fighters to wear their own sponsors/special ring entrances to squeeze out fighter earnings (they give those spots to sponsors now). It's a mess
Sad to hear, but at least this is on the radar of some folks today. It was really tough to raise awareness of how poorly the fighters were paid before the UFC was a publicly traded company, and certainly back during the "dark era", where you could only watch events if you had satellite TV (or a very good tape-trading connection).