Sherdog is reporting that a previously announced line of Fedor branded clothing has been scrapped after the producers Tapout were threatened with being blacklisted from the UFC should they continue to do business with the legendary Russian heavyweight. M-1 Global President Vadim Finkelstein told Loretta Hunt that “It was our understanding that the T-shirt was in production…however, at the beginning of this week, we were told by our sponsorship representative that Tapout had received a call from Dana, which involved him saying that if Fedor signs a T-shirt deal with Tapout, then Tapout would be out of the UFC.”
Finkelstein claimed that this is further evidence of the UFC trying to ‘ruin’ Fedor claiming that they had previously experienced problems before with companies being interested in working with them eventually backing out due to pressure from the UFC. Finkelstein accuses the UFC President of ‘sometimes being cruel’ and complaining that he was putting Fedor under ‘constant pressure’. The UFC and Tapout have both yet to respond to M-1 Global claims.
If true, this is obviously pretty sharp business practice with the UFC seemingly using its dominant market position to scupper a rival fighter’s business deal. This is far from unprecedented, with the UFC having banned Dan Henderson’s Clinch Gear clothing line (and new Fedor sponsor) only last year. However this isn’t Dana White going out of his way to be difficult for no reason; sponsorship income is one of the key revenue streams for fighters so forcing the biggest companies to only sponsor UFC fighters helps entrench the UFC’s supremacy. It does this by not just stopping headliners in smaller promotions maximizing their sponsorship income but by also increasing the business opportunities for its own fighters. Forced to choose, few companies are going to pick fighters in Bellator and Strikeforce over the exposure they receive from sponsoring fighters in the UFC so the money companies would have spent sponsoring their headliners is money they now spend on lower-level fighters in the UFC. This achieves the double whammy of making fighting in the UFC more financially rewarding while at the same time making their competitors less attractive. There’s also the side benefit of denying rival fighters the credibility of being associated with prominent brands such as Tapout. You may disagree with the ethics of the UFC’s actions but their logic is undoubtedly sound.
