Dai Posted November 6, 2023 Share Posted November 6, 2023 A few new stories have popped into my news feed the last few days, where the UFC payouts for this period have been released because of a lawsuit. Some very interesting stuff in there: https://www.sportbible.com/mma/ufc/conor-mcgregor-ufc-pay-600408-20231103 https://bloodyelbow.com/2023/11/06/ufc-payouts-lawsuit-conor-mcgregor/#ronda-rouseys-payouts A few highlights Ive spotted: - Lesnar winning at life with an $8 mill pay off for his Mark Hunt fight. - Conor, from his debut to his second Diaz fight, earned $20 mill. When you think of the PPV buys and gates he provided during this, that is an insanely low amount. UFC made hundreds of millions from him. - Anderson Silva got nearly $11 mill for his Nick Diaz, Bisping and Cormier fights. Nice little retirement fund for him. $4 mill alone for the Cormier match, which was a stinker if I remember it correctly, - CM Punk got a million for the shit show against Gall. - In the middle of his epic title reign, Mighty Mouse got just $350k against Tim Elliot and $245k for the first Cejudo match. That seems absolute insanity. Must have been a huge bitter pill to swallow for him. - Bones Jones must have had the worst manager in MMA. For the biggest star in the UFC, he was on hardly anything. He was earning around just $2 mill for his entire title reign. Against Vitor, Glover and Gustafsson, at the peak of his fame, he was only making around $1.2 mill. As much as we all hate him, it does put into perspective the moaning he was doing for all these years about pay. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tamura Posted November 9, 2023 Share Posted November 9, 2023 On 11/6/2023 at 3:45 PM, Dai said: - In the middle of his epic title reign, Mighty Mouse got just $350k against Tim Elliot and $245k for the first Cejudo match. That seems absolute insanity. Must have been a huge bitter pill to swallow for him. To be honest, he was probably being overpaid. Here's the PPV buys/attendances/ticket revenue from the shows where he was the main or co-main event, I won't bother with non-PPV shows. Co-main at UFC 152: Jones vs. Belfort - 16,800 fans paying $1,921,000, 450,000 PPV buys Main at UFC 174: Johnson vs. Bagautinov - 13,506 fans paying $1,140,000, 115,000 PPV buys Main at UFC 178: Johnson vs. Cariaso - 10,554 fans paying $2,200,000, 205,000 PPV buys (from my 2023 eyes this looks a seriously stacked card, so unsure how much credit Johnson can be given for this bearing in mind the typical buys for his headlining shows) Main at UFC 186: Johnson vs. Horiguchi - 10,154 fans paying $668,000, 125,000 PPV buys Main at UFC 191: Johnson vs. Dodson 2 - 10,873 fans paying $1,362,700, 115,000 PPV buys Co-main at UFC 197: Jones vs. Saint Preux - 11,352 fans paying $2,300,000, 322,000 PPV buys Co-main at UFC 216: Ferguson vs. Lee - 10,638 fans paying $677,999, 200,000 PPV buys Co-main at UFC 227: Dillashaw vs. Garbrandt 2 - 17,794 fans paying $2,848,928, 300,000 buys Other than the UFC 178 outlier it's clear that, at least in terms of this sample set, when he's the main event Johnson sold significantly less PPVs than when someone else is headlining. Difficulty to say whether that's because of the lack of interest in smallers fighters across combat sports, UFC's failure to promote him or the division properly, or just Johnson's ineptitude at promoting, or a combination of all three. But purely from those numbers, as good as his title reign may have been, it was a box-office failure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dai Posted November 10, 2023 Author Share Posted November 10, 2023 Yeah it's always been the case that he just never connected with the mass market. I assume alot of it is to do with his size. Still feels wrong for a long serving champ to be on that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.