How To Make Money As A Woman Fighter

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Conor McGregor'due south Lamborghini purrs similar Mike Tyson'south tiger.

Greener than the edge of a fresh dollar bill, the Lambo spits burn like someone but threatened its khaleesi. Henry Ford and H.Chiliad. Wells, typing for fortnights on finish, could never have conceived of such a automobile.

But if you lot're the king of MMA here in 2017, information technology's yours. It's good to be the male monarch. The glitz is downright blinding.

So blinding, in fact, that information technology can be difficult to spot the rust on Lauren Irish potato's Neon.

You don't see a lot of Dodge Neons out in the streets these days. Murphy'south is a 2004 piece. It'southward careworn. And here that Neon is, cooling its heels in the heart of the Arizona function park where Murphy trains.

The Neon doesn't spit burn, at least not on command, but there is all the same good news on the vehicle front end for Murphy, and the good news is twofold. Get-go, information technology's paid for. Second, people don't believe her when she tells them it'due south hers.

"I was at a gym one time working out," recalled White potato, who, like McGregor, competes for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. "And the guy behind the desk was similar, 'Oh my god, you're in the UFC.' He was kind of going on near it. He thought it was so absurd. And at that place was a [Cadillac] Escalade parked outside ... and he goes, 'Is that your Escalade out there?' And I just laughed and laughed."

Lauren Tater makes the walk to the Octagon. Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

That pretty much sums it up these days for the overwhelming bulk of MMA fighters. And information technology's why MMA is at an inflection betoken.

Popularity and revenue are growing for the sport and the UFC, its unchallenged standard-bearer. Fans love MMA for the competitive purity, skill, courage, action and, yep, claret. But those things come at a price. And it'southward a cost well-nigh fighters, fifty-fifty at the highest levels, say they aren't recouping.

Even in the wake of the UFC's $4 billion sale earlier this year to Hollywood superagency WME-IMG, fighter pay remains relatively meager. According to fighters and experts in and out of MMA, that could undermine—if information technology hasn't already—the sport's continued growth.

Lauren Spud'south Neon Lauren Murphy

"You wake upward every day, and y'all're hurting, and you lot wake upwards and you're f--rex exhausted," White potato said. "Where's all the money? Where's the rockstar stuff? You lot've got to dear what you do. It makes me cry a lot. This life is actually pretty hard. Yous have to honey the grind."

When morale depends on love, you lot're walking a thin tightrope.

According to a UFC document circulated in July to potential investors and later obtained past Bleacher Report, the UFC earned $592 million over the 12 months leading up to the 2nd quarter of 2016.

Of the xviii UFC events held in 2016 for which fighter payouts were publicly disclosed, the median fighter's annual salary was $42,000, according to a Bleacher Study analysis. This includes $50,000 post-fight bonuses handed out to about four fighters per event, but not the modest and widely criticized tiered payments offered through the UFC'due south sponsorship deal with Reebok. It likewise doesn't include the locker-room checks and other financial perks UFC officials privately dole out through contracts or their own discretion.

No one is suggesting $42,000 is a bad almanac salary. According to Salary.com, that'due south a middle-income chore on par with positions like office manager, accounting clerk or entry-level electrician, to proper noun just a few. But when the massive risks and expenses fighters face up are considered, plus the massive wealth accumulated past the modern UFC, the numbers become more than hit.

The UFC held 41 events apiece in 2015 and 2016. Assuming revenue and fighter pay follow the trendlines laid out in its document and the public domain, UFC fighters take home 15.vi per centum of the acquirement pie. And that's before you deduct the costs of training, nutrition and other professional considerations, which fighters cover from their own pockets.

With all this in heed, 2016 was still a banner year for UFC fighter pay. The record for the biggest single-fight payout was broken twice. Brock Lesnar set a new mark with the $ii.five meg he earned for his appearance at UFC 200, then McGregor bankrupt it barely a month afterward with a $3 million payout for his rematch with Nate Diaz at UFC 202 (Diaz got a healthy $2 million).

McGregor and Diaz at UFC 202. Brandon Magnus/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

McGregor and so purportedly exceeded his ain record in November at UFC 205, the kickoff UFC result in New York City (it's impossible to know for certain since New York'southward athletic commission, like many others, does not release fighter pay information). And Ronda Rousey earned a disclosed $iii million take for her loss to Amanda Nunes at UFC 207 in late December.

This is all slap-up, but in that location is no evidence of a trickle-downward effect. Amidst the 18 salary-reported events of 2016, 79 fighters earned $20,000 or less, co-ordinate to Bleacher Written report'south assay. On May 29, Thomas Almeida fabricated $25,000 for fighting in the principal event of UFC Fight Night 88. On Dec. 17, Michelle Waterson took home $fourscore,000 (including a post-fight bonus) for defeating up-and-comer and Dancing with the Stars runner-up Paige VanZant in the primary event of UFC on Trick 22. On July 9, Nunes made a disclosed $100,000 for winning the UFC women's bantamweight championship in the main issue of the blockbuster UFC 200 card.

This all illustrates impending danger, fighters and analysts say. Why take the risks a fighter does while foregoing relatively common benefits like a retirement plan and twelvemonth-round health insurance if substantial fiscal rewards reach merely a tiny minority? Why bargain with the instability of never knowing when your next payday will come? Instead of being an MMA fighter, why not be an MMA instructor or a schoolteacher or a baseball thespian or an bookkeeping clerk? How many stars has the sport lost because athletes preemptively decided on greener pastures?

Fighters are beginning to take detect. They are get-go to carry their gainsay instincts from the grooming room to the boardroom. Something, as they say, has to give.

"Large-name fighters are enervating more than money considering they understand they're the draw," said Michael Colangelo, assistant manager of projects at the Sports Business Plant at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "You could bring in fighters who are willing to fight for lower money, but the quality of your product can become down, and that's the last thing the UFC wants."

'A Mutual Misconception'

Even the greatest MMA gym in the world smells like sweat and feet. It's a Tuesday morning at the Jackson Wink University in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the edifice is packed and noisy. Wet-haired fighters shuffle shoulder-to-shoulder through striking drills. To one side, in an elevated Octagon, ii young men in headgear spar every bit coaches bark instructions. "Milk shake, Rattle and Roll," the old Beak Haley tune, takes anybody through their paces, a fitting if inadvertent mantra to the simple, demanding, strangely glorious life of a fighter.

Jon Jones trains here. And so do Carlos Condit, Holly Holm, Donald Cerrone and a slew of other well-known champions and contenders. You might think the UFC's fighter-pay issue doesn't touch this place. But information technology does.

On the gym'southward 2d level, most the business organization offices, Lando Vannata reclines on a couch and thinks about life. At that time and since, he'due south had a pretty good run. Despite only two fights in the UFC Octagon, he's probably the hottest article in the lightweight segmentation, McGregor nonetheless. Not bad because two years ago he was chopping cucumbers at Subway in between contests on regional circuits.

"I was living in poverty," he said. "I was making about $xviii,000 a year. I didn't have a vehicle. I was living in the tiniest apartments I could notice—nether $500 a calendar month. I was in here every mean solar day teaching private lessons, trying to make as much money as I could. ... There was a point where I was eating 18 eggs a 24-hour interval. I was eating tuna out of cans."

Landon Vannata Brandon Magnus/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

Perhaps no 1 in UFC history has capitalized more on the UFC's pay construction than Vannata. He had two UFC fights in 2016, two spectacular displays of violence, and netted ii $50,000 operation bonuses. Vannata is now the proud owner of a truck. If he wants tuna, he doesn't demand a tin can opener. He even socked a piffling coin away.

The bonus structure speaks to the risks fighters have to get paid. They go for big knockouts and submissions to nab incentives that bump their pay from, say, $10,000, which about entry-level UFC fighters receive for their debut, to $seventy,000—the base $ten,000 money for showing up to fight plus the standard entry-level $10,000 for a win plus $l,000 for a bonus.

And that'due south to say nothing of the wellness risks, which are exacerbated by the fact that many debuting UFC fighters, Vannata among them, must accept the big show's call on brusque notice, coming as information technology normally does when another fighter falls injured late in camp.

In short, fighters regularly compete at less than 100 per centum and with actress aggression, because they literally tin can't beget not to.

Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

"Virtually fighters in the UFC, they are starving," Georges St-Pierre, the longtime UFC welterweight champion, told The MMA Hour(h/t Marc Raimondi of MMA Fighting) in October. "And for UFC, it's very easy when you keep a lot of your staff starving, they are easier to command."

On the other hand, as the MMA business organisation booms and understanding of the sport's economic science deepens, fighters like Vannata are gaining more than awareness of the numbers—and their own indispensable role in generating them.

"You see the brain conditions that some people have had. ... We're putting ourselves through a lot of trauma for the fans and for making the UFC the money that they make," Vannata said. "Unless you're at the very top making a lot of money, you're even so non making anything to a higher place average for the boilerplate income in the U.S. I call up a lot of people remember because we're professional athletes and nosotros fight on big cards, nosotros fight on Fox, that we make a lot more money than nosotros actually practise. It's a common misconception."

An inside expect at the UFC's finances suggests it doesn't have to be this manner.

According to the confidential document obtained by Bleacher Report, of the $592 million the UFC earned in 2015, 76 per centum came from "content," broadly divers as UFC event broadcasts and the various ways in which those broadcasts are monetized, from pay-per-views to Fight Pass, the UFC'due south subscription streaming service.

In other words, fights.

In dissimilarity to the estimated 15.6 percent of total UFC revenue fighters earn on average, NFL players receive xl percent of local acquirement, 45 percentage of sponsorship money and 55 per centum of revenue from media deals.

In contrast to the UFC's $42,000 estimated median salary, the NBA's minimum salary was $525,093 in 2015; rookies in the NFL made $435,000, $507,500 in Major League Baseball and $575,000 in the NHL.

But, one might say, these sports are more established and lucrative than the UFC, and they accept unions that collectively bargain on the athletes' behalf. Fair enough. More similar, and then, may exist the PGA or ATP, neither of which are unionized and both of which garner similar TV ratings. (TV ratings are themselves imperfect comparators, because the UFC's marquee events air on pay-per-view, but they tin can provide a reasonable measuring stick.)

On April sixteen, UFC on Fox 19 pulled in a Nielsen rating of 0.8, co-ordinate to TV by the Numbers. Later on performance bonuses, three of the carte du jour's 22 fighters earned reported salaries of $100,000 or more, with the main effect winner, Glover Teixeira, taking in $170,000 to top all earners.

On the same day, the third round of the PGA'south RBC Heritage drew a 1.ii rating on CBS, per SportsBusiness Daily'due south Austin Karp. Thirteen golfers at the upshot earned $100,000 or more. The eventual winner, Branden Grace, took in $1.06 million.

Of the 622 golfers on the PGA Tour'due south career money leaders listing, 483 have earned at least $1 meg.

Of the 1,393 UFC fighters MMA Manifesto listed by career fighter earnings, 95 are career millionaires, while 211 have earned $10,000 or less.

Making Ends Meet

Murphy and her husband, Joe, rent a business firm in the Phoenix suburb of Peoria. It's not the worst neighborhood in the world. Information technology's too not Scottsdale. Razor wire is a mutual accessory, spiraling one-half-rusted over junkyard fences and lawn walls. Restaurants without drive-thrus are few and far between.

On acme of dozens of hours of weekly training, Lauren handles most of the cooking and cleaning for herself, Joe and her 15-year-sometime son, Max.

Exercise non mess with Lauren'due south slow-cooker skills.

"If I don't do the Crock-Pot, sometimes we just end upwards having to go to In-N-Out Burger," said Murphy, sitting at her kitchen tabular array and eyeing a kale smoothie equally the aroma of chicken wafts through the air. "Then I don't feel great, and I don't train great."

Credit: Scott Harris

Yet, Murphy is one of the lucky ones. Joe is a principal sergeant with the U.S. Air Strength Reserve. Between them, they get the bills paid. To supplement their income, Lauren previously fired upwardly the Neon earlier sunrise to get teach martial arts, only she recently quit to railroad train full time.

Martial arts educational activity is not an unfamiliar job for whatever number of fighters at all levels of the sport. Neither are plenty of other jobs.

Have Bryan Barberena, who trains alongside Murphy and a host of other standouts at the MMA Lab in Glendale, Arizona. He's 1 of the lucky ones, as well. You may know Barberena best equally the guy who derailed the Sage Northcutt hype train concluding Jan with a asphyxiate-out of the ballyhooed Texas prospect.

Barberena might be considered lucky for a reason too his UFC career, considering apparently being a repo man isn't about as difficult as information technology used to be.

"I take this car, and it's got cameras on it," Barberena explained. "Basically, I simply drive around, and if the camera sees a license plate they're looking for, it beeps and I phone call the tow truck."

He doesn't even have to fight anybody.

"Nah," he said with a smile. "We're told to go out if anyone comes out. We're not supposed to confront everyone. We just leave."

At that place's just one problem: He doesn't knock off until 3 a.grand. If he has a fight coming upwardly, he can get out a piffling earlier, but by and big, he runs on nearly five hours of sleep a night.

"It takes away from my sleep, but information technology's what I have to do to help out my wife and kids," he said.

Bryan Barberena Buda Mendes/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

Not even i of those big performance bonuses could stave off the repo job. Barberena took home a $50,000 Fight of the Dark reward in 2015 following a losing effort against Chad Laprise. To hear Barberena tell it, when you're a fighter with a wife and iii children, the money's gone before it comes in the door.

"It didn't really change that much at all," he said. "You know, it'southward a big clamper of coin, but later taxes and after paying out your management team and all the fees of training and stuff—it definitely helps, but it's non a life-changer."

Barberena's non the only one burning the midnight oil to make ends encounter. Bouncing and personal training, along with combat instruction, are common side jobs. According to his UFC bio, heavyweight Timothy Johnson's "current means of income are driving a truck, working at a bar, and the Minnesota Ground forces Baby-sit." Boyfriend heavyweight Adam Milstead is a pipeline technician. Irish flyweight Neil Seery works in a warehouse. Welterweight Alan Jouban is a model. Another welterweight, Anton Zafir, is a high schoolhouse instructor. Brazilian lightweight Michel Prazeres is a "Para State War machine Police force Officeholder." The list goes on.

There'south been attrition in high places equally a direct result of the lack of compensation in the UFC. Al Iaquinta, a popular lightweight, walked away from the sport at age 29 and with a 12-three-1 record to piece of work in existent estate, citing contract issues as a reason for his inactivity. In 2012, Cole Konrad retired equally an undefeated champion in Bellator for a job trading agricultural commodities, calling MMA a "dead-end job."

That phrase may hateful more than Konrad intended. Low pay combined with the fact that pro fighters must handle the costs of their ain training and nutrition make it difficult for athletes to attain their peaks. That's why the product is vulnerable, though MMA couldn't exist any hotter or more visible, with a shiny and surely lucrative new TV deal looming in 2018. Second jobs, fighters contend, tin distract from fighting, weakening their performance, pay and future opportunities. It's a vicious cycle they say hurts all involved.

"If you get more than money, you tin brand sure you're eating right, make sure y'all're cutting weight right, make certain yous're training right," said Nick Urso, a Jackson Wink flyweight who competes on smaller circuits. "You'll have the proper training partners. So, in the end, you're going to get a improve product and a better fighter across the lath."

Doing It for the Dear

UFC fighters know they have reason to be grateful. Beyond the prestige that status confers, the fiscal gulf between the UFC and the residue of the MMA world is stark. Later arguably the biggest fight of 2016 for the Bellator MMA promotion, which is endemic by media behemothic Viacom, top stars Michael Chandler and Benson Henderson each earned a disclosed $50,000. Justin Gaethje and David Branch, arguably the ii biggest names in the Earth Series of Fighting promotion, max out at well-nigh $100,000 per fight.

Farther down the ladder, on the regional circuits, fighting is the second job.

That's why pilus stylist Eli Tamez, who has a 9-0 record while mainly competing in the well-regarded Legacy Fighting Title, puts in six hours a twenty-four hours at the salon in his hometown of Rockwall, Texas. He works with both men and women, does both cut and colour—whatsoever you need. Flexible scheduling means he can railroad train in his spare time.

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"It does go pretty crazy," Tamez acknowledged. "I wake up early, I get my son ready for schoolhouse, I train, come to the salon, go home for a couple hours and and so train at night. ... You have to have a job, unless y'all just have a ton of money lying effectually. Fighting for me is more than like hobby money. ... I dearest it because I love winning. It'southward really addicting."

In Albuquerque, Urso took dwelling $2,000 for his final tour, a win in the Resurrection Fighting Brotherhood. He's getting involved in the concern end of Jackson Wink, helping head coach Greg Jackson train instructors for new gyms, among other things. Not a bad perk for training at the greatest MMA gym in the globe.

But Urso sticks with fighting. Why? But one simple reason: He loves it. If he didn't love it, for all the talent his 9-2 pro tape suggests, he likely would have gone back to Florida and his job as a legal clerk.

"If not for this [new job], I probably would have stopped fighting years ago," Urso said. "It's hard to live paycheck-to-paycheck when y'all don't fifty-fifty know when the next paycheck is coming. ... If there was no money being fabricated, nosotros wouldn't argue with y'all. I'm fighting for peanuts because I beloved it. I think if I didn't honey it, I wouldn't do information technology."

The Bear upon of New Owners

Fighters are tough. Mostly, they don't complain. They get stuff done. Shake, rattle and roll. More than and more than, though, they are asking questions near the reality of their compensation.

MMA is at a loftier-water marker in terms of a motility toward unionization, but and then far the fighters and impresarios tin can't go out of their ain style.

Yet, sports business analysts say, information technology behooves fighters in the long run to stick with their efforts if they want their pay to increase, as it did for other sports leagues post-obit unionization.

"If you track the history of pro sports, athletes all start out receiving very little of the overall revenue," said Scott Rosner, an attorney and faculty associate director at the Wharton Sports Business organisation Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. "Every bit the sport grows, the athletes get more, too. [WME-IMG] volition probably fight confronting it, and how that turns out is anyone'due south guess. Only [fighter] leverage is increasing, merely considering their names are out there more than."

Credit: Eli Tamez

WME-IMG executives have stayed mum on the topic of fighter pay. Their actions, however, are giving some the creeps. In October, Ariel Helwani of MMA Fighting reported the UFC laid off as many every bit 80 corporate employees, nigh fifteen pct of its workforce. Non long afterward, it released 13 fighters.

Could deeper roster cuts be far behind? It'southward an open question for now, but indications are the bloodletting won't be equally severe—at least on the fighter side—as the gloomiest observers predicted.

"Cutting the roster limits the number of fights you tin actually accept," USC'south Colangelo said. "That cuts down on how many pay-per-views you accept and maybe what you tin charge for Fight Pass."

According to the confidential document obtained by Bleacher Report, WME-IMG leaders borrowed well-nigh half of the $iv billion price tag to purchase the UFC.

More than fighter cuts can and probably volition occur, but the document points to operational redundancies, a more "toll-effective marketing automobile" and the "professionalization of business concern" as the choicest areas for trimming fatty, equally opposed to reducing the fighter roster or fighter compensation.

"Their cost-cutting is more about WME-IMG using their scale to leverage deals ameliorate," Colangelo said. "They're going to make certain anybody on the staff side has a chore. ... WME-IMG is a little more buttoned-up in how they handle things. At that place's going to be a deviation."

The Conor Factor

That could be reassuring for fighters, but the question of pay and what fighters can do to increase their share of the pie remains.

The UFC did not respond to multiple requests for annotate for this story. In late 2015, however, Lorenzo Fertitta, who co-owned the UFC before selling information technology to WME-IMG, defended fighter-pay practices:

The fact of the matter is, fighter pay has connected to increment every single twelvemonth that we've owned the company. We pay way more than than anybody else in the space; that's a fact. And you do have some fighters that perchance aren't happy with what they get, simply at the end of the day, the fighters that attain great things in this sport and get to the level of actually being able to make a career of it—you don't see many of those athletes complaining. That's the fact of the matter. The guys who are rise to the top are making the majority of the money.

That kind of logic points squarely to McGregor.

Quondam UFC chief content officeholder Marshall Zelaznik was among last fall'southward layoffs. Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images

The Irish sensation, who in 2016 became the kickoff to simultaneously concord two UFC titles, has earned $9.5 million over his career, according to MMA Manifesto's career earnings list. That's an MMA tape.

McGregor has used his massive clout as a cudgel against the UFC, with mixed results. It has fifty-fifty been suggested McGregor is interested in starting his own promotion some day, independent of the UFC.

Afterwards his UFC 205 win, McGregor insisted on calling more shots in the futurity.

"They've got to come up talk to me now, that'south all I know," McGregor said, per ESPN.com's Brett Okamoto. "Both belts, chunk of money, picayune family on the way—y'all want me to stick effectually and keep doing what I'm doing? Let'due south talk. I want buying at present. I want the equal share. I desire what I deserve, what I've earned."

McGregor's camp did non respond to a request for comment for this story.

Though McGregor's bold attitude toward the UFC is interesting and unprecedented, information technology isn't plenty by itself to amend conditions, analysts said.

"You need stars and the rank and file to be on the same folio," Colangelo said. "You'll hear more and more about this tendency toward unionization. It will be interesting to see what Conor McGregor does. LeBron James and stars like that in other sports could sit there and say, 'No bacon cap. I desire to get paid.' But those stars sacrifice for the ones in the eye, to assist all the union members get paid what they're worth."

Some stars are making the effort. On Nov. xxx, with big UFC names like St-Pierre, Cain Velasquez and TJ Dillashaw on phase, the MMA Athletes Clan was announced. It is the third such clan to form, alongside the MMA Fighters Clan and Professional Fighters Association.

"Every time we fight, we're afraid," St-Pierre said at the news conference. "This is a different fight. I know a lot of the states are afraid. It'due south fourth dimension to stride up, do the right affair. ... Information technology's time to stand together."

But on the aforementioned solar day, McGregor, as only he tin, simultaneously stole and enhanced the spotlight past applying for a battle license, a assuming activity that marked a footstep toward a nine-effigy blockbuster with Floyd Mayweather Jr.—potentially without the UFC'due south permission.

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As McGregor took the attending, the MMAAA began to take on water. Among other problems, people reacted poorly to Bjorn Rebney, who has a leadership role with the clan but did not earn a fighter-friendly reputation while running Bellator.

There's no question the UFC, which under previous buying was fairly hostile to the idea of fighter arrangement, will keep to concur enough of cards because of its unique position.

"The UFC has a tremendous corporeality of leverage," Rosner said. "They tin can tell the athlete to go away, to pound sand. That makes information technology tricky and highly risky for the athlete. What they really need to do is bind together."

If compensation doesn't ameliorate in the UFC or elsewhere, the sport could exist cutting off its nose to spite its face.

"The dream is you're going to get to the UFC or any big organization, and, blast, you lot're gonna be set," Barberena said. "You lot're a professional athlete, and yous've made it to the elevation. It just happens to non be that manner."

Scott Harris is a freelance writer who covers MMA for Bleacher Report. He is bachelor on Twitter. All quotes obtained immediate unless otherwise noted.

Source: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2685605-for-love-not-money-how-low-fighter-pay-is-undermining-mma

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