There’s always a dull spot in the year when the issue of fighter pay comes up for some reason. One year it was ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” discussing it. This year it’s been started because of Chris Leben tweeting about it, snowballing as the discussion between fans, media members and current & former fighters chiming in to discuss their take on the subject. Leben, who a short while before openly discussed about how he spent the majority of his purses and plethora of fight bonuses on illegal drugs over the course of his career, discussed (and later deleted) how he was broke and would’ve preferred to have been a truck driver instead of a fighter.
He’s not the first fighter to have suggested a better living in a blue collar field instead of his chosen one as a professional prize fighter. It usually happens after pay discussions or Dana White throwing fighters under the bus. A short while ago Tim Kennedy discussed that he could make more money as a garbage man than as a pro fighter, as well. One topic always comes up immediately after any significant and meaningful fighter pay discussions: A fighter’s union.
It’s similar to the discussion about pro wrestling wages, with a “wrestler’s union'” having been bandied about for some time by many high profile former WWE stars but never coming to fruition. The UFC intentionally modeled themselves after the then WWF in terms of contract structure and pay when they were taken over by Zuffa. Pro fighters maintain the same “independent contractor” status with the Fertitta Brothers and the UFC as ‘WWE Superstars” do with Vince McMahon and the WWE. Jon Jones isn’t a UFC employee in the same way John Cena isn’t a WWE employee; both are well compensated for what amounts to be a highly lucrative and exclusive contractual agreement that can be severed by either party in a variety of means.
To understand the difficult of an MMA union negotiating with the UFC, Bellator, etc, is to understand the nature of collective bargaining and professional sports as a whole.
It’s vastly different from the team professional sports, where athletes are directly employed by the various sports franchises that comprise the major sports leagues. They also have union representation and benefits therein, something UFC fighters don’t have, as part of a collective bargaining process (through a collective bargaining agreement or CBA that gets voted on by both sides and agreed to for a set time length) through sports unions offering labor peace and exclusivity for both sides.
The NFL and the NFLPA (football players’ union) negotiate on a set CBA doling out various things including budget limits for teams based on various revenue streams, for example, and everything about pro football is controlled by both organizations. Every other sports league follows this example, from pro basketball (NBA and the NBAPA) to pro soccer (MLS and the MLSPA), pro baseball (MLB and MLBPA), hockey (NHL and NHLPA) and everywhere else.
Pro sports leagues and players unions go hand in hand for many reasons, most of them stemming from ownership imposing draconian terms and the players banding together to negotiate for better ones en masse. Owners need product to stay afloat financially and players want as much of the profit pie as they can. Both sides come together to get as much as they can and ensure this arrangement. Sometimes labor peace is achieved en masse and lasts for decades at a time. For others labor strife is the norm.
The history of pro sports comprises some of the bitterest disagreements between unions and organizations for good reason. Without a players’ union to fight for it in court a player could be attached to a franchise he didn’t like and not be paid for what he feels he is worth. The ability for free market capitalism to work in pro sports, where a worker can submit his services for whomever he feels appropriate at a negotiated salary, works because of the mutually beneficial relationship between organization and union.
They also negotiate from a place of mutually beneficial strengths. The NFL solely negotiates for television rights packages, et al, and the sum of money they are given for them becomes part of a revenue stream that things like a salary cap develop from. The players are the product being sold, of course, and there’s a set piece of piece to be negotiated from. Players and owners know how much is on the table; they’re just dividing it up between both sides.
At the heart of it professional sports unions exist because everyone wants as much money as they can. It’s also because no one else can offer what they do.
A reason why the NFL and NFLPA can do all of this, for example, is because there’s no other organization of note. The NFL is a monopoly of professional football and thusly both sides only have to negotiate with one another for labor peace. It’s why a fighters union is so much more difficult to try and contemplate; there is no such thing as a pure MMA monopoly like there is in other sports. It’s arguably why it’ll never happen, too. Professional fighters can ply their trade at the highest level in the UFC but there are other places to cash a paycheck as well. The UFC has the highest level of pay for the most part, much like the NFL does to pro football, but the NFL doesn’t have to deal with a promotion like KSW paying more for a certain fighter than the UFC would.
How do we potentially get a union to deal with Zuffa on behalf of the fighters? A couple of things would have to happen first, in what I’ll list out. For sake of argument we’ll call it the UFC Player’s Association or UFCPA.
Five Steps for The UFCPA To Come Into Existence
(And Stay in Existence)
1. Exclusivity from Fox (or another network) for the UFC in North America
A fighter’s union won’t happen until the UFC is exclusively a Fox Sports entity in North America. A HUGE reason why the major sports teams have a union is because there’s a set, finite pie to draw from in terms of a TV contract. Players know all the revenue streams coming in because of their CBA, of course, and all of it constructed in agreement to determine the percentages the players are entitled to as a group. Each team gets their own cut to do with as it pleases, mandated by the league to spend a high percentage. Thus to do so the fighters will need Zuffa to have Fox pay them so much for exclusive content like the NFL does. When there’s a set pie the UFC is drawing from in North America, and pay per view is long and buried as a continuingly successful and profitable enterprise, then it’ll be easier to negotiate.
Zuffa can offer things like PPV points, etc, because they still make the bulk of their money that way. Their Fox contract is substantial, rumored to be in excess of $150 million annually, but it’s not huge among sports rights fees in the modern era. Roger Goodell and the NFL would call that tidy sum “cute” if offered it for the NFL right now for similar North American exclusivity.
The UFC would have to get truly game-changing NFL caliber cash to become a pro sports league with a union instead of a fight promotion with a roster. A large annual check, instead of hoping PPV revenues keep pace with expectations, makes dividing everything easier. If the UFC has a set amount it makes from TV deals worldwide it gets into easily identifiable pool of money to be divided up, much like how the NFL and every other sports league is set up.
2. An exit from PPV almost entirely
PPV is a huge chip the UFC has and it probably won’t let it go without a death grip. It’s been such a profound way to make money in combat sports that it arguably will never leave as a payment mechanism. Unless NBC offers Floyd Mayweather $150 million to fight on free television he won’t be returning there, either. Unless the bottom truly falls out of PPV I imagine it’ll never truly exit the marketplace as a revenue stream, either, but for a fighter’s union to happen it’ll need to have disappeared as a major revenue stream for the UFC. As long as they can offer top stars and champions a way to make sums of money that no other fighter will have access to means the UFC has their ultimate poker chip.
The UFC and pro boxing are the last main holdouts of PPV. The biggest fights of the year are exclusively on PPV for the latter and the UFC still does substantial business there annually as well. The landscape has changed though; if you would’ve said 10 years ago that the WWF would no longer view PPV as a viable revenue stream in 2014 you’d have been laughed at. Now they just launched the WWE Network and are offering their monthly PPV cards in the $10 per month charge.
3. Top stars need to be the ones advocating for it
I love Tim Kennedy as a fighter. I’ve met Kennedy, at the first event I live covered, and in the brief interaction I had with him he was a genuinely nice and decent human being. But Tim Kennedy isn’t going to be the person that will get the UFC roster rallied behind him to try and get the UFC to work with what I’m labeled as the UFCPA (to match up with the NFL, et al).
It’ll take the Ronda Rouseys, Chris Weidmans and Jon Joneses of the world to get a fighters’ union going. The NFLPA was started by two star players, Abe Gidron and Dante Lavelli, and the UFCPA would need to have the biggest draws in the company in the fold to have any sort of meaningful existence and negotiations. Those making the most matter more because they have more sway; it’s why every meaningful labor negotiation in professional team sports always has a handful of star athletes in it.
No one cares what D.J Augustin has to say about the current NBA CBA. Everyone cares what Lebron James has to say. It’ll take the very top of the food chain to get a meaningful fighters’ union together. They have the most to risk; someone like Sergio Pettis won’t be listened to if he speaks of the UFC needing its own UFCPA. Anthony Pettis, on the other hand, would garner a lot of people listening to him if he said the same thing.
4. Zuffa needs some labor strife … or at least the appearance of it
As much as I’d hate for the UFC to have to cancel a couple events, etc, the one thing that’ll bring them to the table would be for the fighters en masse agreeing not to fight until the UFC cedes to them and agrees to collective bargaining. Right now the UFC would laugh if a group of fighters said they weren’t going to fight unless the UFC cedes to them and UFCPA for collective bargaining. If the UFC roster walked out as a group and a Fight Night got cancelled then the UFC would notice.
The key thing is that the UFC would need to feel its wallet being lifted. An event cancellation would do it … as would a group of fighters and the UFC getting close to a cancellation as well. When it’s either play ball or no one makes any money … the UFC will play ball and negotiate. They can threaten to find a group of fighters for a card but when push comes to the shove they can’t sell an AXS TV card as a UFC caliber card. Dana White is full of bluster on a lot of things but Lorenzo & Frank Fertitta are the men suffering the most with a potential UFC strike.
If negotiating with a UFCPA and getting labor peace in exchange for conceding on a number of issues allows them to keep their roster and promote fight cards they’ll go along to get alone.
5. The Muhammad Ali Act needs to be enforced on MMA promoters on a national level
The Ali act makes fight promoters pay a significant portion of their total profits towards the fighters on a card for boxing promoters and yet the UFC has skated by because it hasn’t been applied to them. They claim to pay over 50% of their total grosses out to fighters and other estimates peg that at 25% or so. The Ali Act requires promoters to pay a much higher portion of that and with more money being available to fighters the better fighter pay could get.
Zuffa being forced to pay out a higher portion of what it makes can enrich a handful of people exorbitantly who are fighting … or the tides can raise all ships. A UFCPA able to negotiate with this as settled law can make everyone more cash.
