Dana White is not moving an inch on his position regarding UFC fighter pay.
For the past several years, White has repeatedly come under fire for fighter pay in the UFC, will several high-profile fighters speaking out against the current structure, and YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul making it his personal life’s mission to antagonize the UFC President over the issue. White refused to speak out, insisting that fighters were not being paid enough and saying that the UFC will never change. But with fighters like Tyron Woodley making more to boxing Jake Paul than he made in his entire UFC career, the topic isn’t going away, and now, the UFC president has adopted a new angle: adding pay scale to his many issues with professional boxing.
“There’s always gonna be head butting,” White said on The Pivot Podcast when asked about UFC fighter pay. Do you have enough income? Do you? I want to meet that guy that goes, ‘Oh, I’m good. I have a lot of money. I don’t need another dime.’ You’re never going to meet that guy. It’s never going to happen. Everyone wants more money. And one of the big problems with boxing too, is that all those f****** guys are overpaid, and every time they put on a fight, it’s a going-out-of-business sale. The goal is to make as much ****** cash as possible from you guys. Once that happens, we will be out. In three years, we’ll be back.
” You can’t create a league like this. You can’t build a sport. You can’t have 750 fighters under contract, making money, feeding their families every year, with that kind of mentality. It doesn’t work. You have to run a business.”
White has certainly run a successful business thus far. Year after year, the company has boasted about breaking its financial records, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this continued growth has come with marginal benefit to the fighters, who still only take home around 20 percent of the company’s yearly revenue, a paltry amount compared to other sports leagues, where that number hovers around 50 percent. Dana White praises UFC’s present structure. The best fighters receive pay-per view points that boost their salary.
” What we did was we created a business model in which, if the champion is chosen, they share the pay-per view revenue.” White stated. White said, “If you are the headlining guy on the card or have been invited to special events, we also know that you bring in the cash, so you too get a share of the pay-per view revenue. You can eat whatever you want.
“The truth is, you get some of these guys that — you can walk in and say, ‘I want $30 million dollars.’ OK, based on what? I do too. Give me $30 million. We all want $30 million, but based on what? And you’re never going to have the guys on the other side worrying about the business of the sport. This isn’t an individual sport. … In this sport here, it’s about me. “I am the largest ****** player here. I knocked out 30 people. This was what I did. I’m a greedy person and will take as much as possible. I don’t care about anyone, even the boss. I don’t care about this whole business. It’s all about me.
“You need to have some control to manage a business. This is because we have built a [business] that allows fighters to make lots of money. Even journeymen [are doing well].”
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White’s insistence that the top fighters in the sport are fairly compensated is belied by the fact that those same fighters continuing to try and talk their way into boxing matches. Heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou seems likely to be headed for a superfight with Tyson Fury once his contract expires in December, and welterweight champion Kamaru Usman has repeatedly lobbied for a fight with Canelo Alvarez, despite White saying outright that he was not interested. Although these would suggest a bigger issue than White can deal with regarding pay, the UFC president says it is all noise.
“Here’s what I always say: if you don’t like what I’m doing, you don’t like the way I’m doing it, go out and raise some money, I did, and start your own and pay them what ever you want to pay them,” White said. “We built one of the most successful sports leagues of all time in 20 years. People actually want to invest money into this thing, which makes the sport grow which makes more opportunities for more people, not just the fighters but my employees, and the people that we hire, and it just continues to grow and grow. When you let these people come in and suck all the life and the money out, it doesn’t work. You have to run a real business and you have to have a business that people are interested and want to invest in.”
