Joe Rogan On UFC-Reebok Deal: I Don’t Like It At All
Come July 11th, UFC fighters will receive tenure based sponsorship pay from the new UFC-Reebok outfitting deal. A deal that has been met with mixed opinions, with champions receiving $40K per fight, challengers $30K and all the way down to $2.5K per fight for newer competitors.
Obviously the fact that most fighters will be receiving a pay cut due to the new deal hasn’t come across well. UFC color commentator Joe Rogan gave his point of view during a recent podcast, as transcribed by MMAJunkie.com:
“I’m not a business man. I’d be the sh-ttiest businessman in the world; if I owned the UFC I would probably file for bankruptcy right now,” Rogan said. “I would have never gotten it to where it is. I would have never done any of the smart moves these guys have done. I’m an idiot when it comes to business, but I don’t like when I see fighters suffering financially. I don’t like it. At all.”
Is the UFC-Reebok deal that bad? Well, on paper it would seem so. Even at the top of the scale, Rogan can’t seem to understand why $40K is the number for the champion:
“Whenever you see these guys complaining and talking about the difference in the amount of pay that they’re getting, that’s not good – just not good,” Rogan said. “All that stuff had to be worked out. It should have been worked out, I think, before.”
“Even the champs get 40 grand. The best guys in the world get 40 grand? That just doesn’t seem like enough to me. It just doesn’t.”
When you consider Brendan Schaub and Matt Mitrione were pocketing six-figure sponsorship cheques per fight, $40,000 certainly doesn’t seem enough for the champion of the world. Still, this deal is going forward, and the options to stop it are slim to none.
Fighter pay in the UFC has come under plenty of scrutiny in the past, so is this just business as usual? Do you think that Rogan is right about the Reebok deal or should the fighters be happy to get anything from in-cage sponsorships?
“It’s great to have a big sponsor like Reebok involved, but not if the fighters have to suffer,”
