Win bonuses and fighter pay: what fighters say about combat sports money
Francis Ngannou, Dustin Poirier, Aljamain Sterling and Matt Serra's group talk through win bonuses or fighter pay, and Craig Jones built a tournament with more than $2 million in prize money around athlete pay. Their accounts show how the money in combat sports reaches the athletes, which fans rarely see.
In the UFC's show-and-win structure a fighter's purse is split in two, and the second part is paid only for a win. A fighter who loses a close fight can go home with about half the money. The fighters and hosts in these conversations mostly say this does not make anyone fight harder and only hands part of a fighter's pay to the judges.
Joe Rogan says he hates win bonuses and prefers boxing's fixed purse. His reasons are that fighters lose half their pay to bad judging, that elite fighters are already trying to win, and that careers are short. Francis Ngannou agrees. He gives everything whether he wins or loses, he says, and a loss already hurts a fighter's next negotiation. He is fine with a bonus as a separate deal, but not with splitting his paycheck. Matt Serra, Din Thomas and John Rallo take the same side with Rogan. One of them says a win bonus, in the case of bad judging, only penalizes the fighter who did nothing wrong.
Dustin Poirier puts the real question higher up: the share of a promotion's revenue that reaches fighters, compared with leagues like the NFL and NBA. He agrees with Rogan about that, but he also puts weight on the fighter's own signature. Push for what you are worth, he says, but "You can't sign a contract and complain."
There are disagreements. Rogan says nobody fights harder because of a win bonus. Aljamain Sterling says a bonus did change his mindset once, at UFC 300, when Dana White announced $300,000 bonuses, though he adds that skilled fighters often cancel each other out. The article notes they are not talking about quite the same money: Rogan means the half of a purse withheld for a loss, and Sterling means a bonus on top.
The sharpest difference is with Craig Jones in submission grappling. His stated mission is to "increase athlete pay," and he built a rival tournament to ADCC, called CJI, with a free stream. Everyone gets $10,000 plus one dollar to show up, each division winner takes $1 million, and second place gets nothing. So where the MMA voices object to a result deciding half the pay, Jones lets the result decide almost all of it, because he wants athletes to chase finishes. His show fee, though, is more than winning ADCC pays.
Rogan, Poirier and Jones each say a second buyer raises pay. Rogan expects it from Netflix and YouTube. Jones says, with his own allegedly attached, that ADCC raised women's prize money and began paying show money once CJI appeared.
Sterling shows the pressure from the inside. He took a fight four months after a knockout loss because he needed the money, and sparred almost entirely by wrestling to avoid head shots.
What to do with it: read a close decision as two checks. If you fight, keep any bonus separate from the purse, negotiate before you sign, look at the share of revenue more than the headline number, count who takes a cut, and build something for afterwards, as Sterling has with Funk Harbor Rum. And do not let a short bank balance set the date of a return. The article says when to come back after a knockout is a question for a doctor.