UFC’s celebrity investors have a chokehold on $300M dividend
- Thread starter jason73
- Start date
Just needs to be Conor and a handful of title holders. Turhtfully it could probably just be Conor showing up on a Friday before a fight and saying "Yeah, do this or the fight's off."
the fighters had the perfect opportunity when the fertittas were selling and they blew it.
It's completely a partisan issue. The National Labor Relations Board is comprised of 5 members. The parties split appointments and whichever party has the White House gets the deciding vote. Whenever a Republicans is in office, the NLRB skews toward management and the Chamber of Commerce recommendations. Whenever a Democrat is in office, they rule toward labor and union leaders generally. It's been this way since the NLRB was founded back in 1935. Collective bargaining is a strictly partisan process here in the US.
I don't know man. There are still plenty of people who think everyone outside of UFC completely sucks and those who think UFC=MMA
And to be clear, Trump did likely directly interfere on Dana's request.
It's not like it's the political 'mileu' that is screwing fighters - they are quite literally being screwed by the people in power.
Thanks for the reply, I can understand your point but feel it's one of emotion rather than logic.
People spend a hundred thousand dollars to build a race car simply for the privilege of risking their lives, you choose to fight people. If you are doing either because you think it's a likely path to financial success then the odds are you will be disappointed. Have these fighters not all trained and competed outside the UFC long beforehand? Also if you know how to make risk free money then you may have a different calling anyway!
I wouldn't say there was no movement. There were 3 attempts at organizing fighters led by 3 different groups. The antitrust suit was launched. Media started reporting on revenue distribution and pay disparity pretty regularly and fighters began to comment on it. Realistically there was a perfect storm trending toward unionization. We talked about it here on this very forum all the time. Then three things happened: 1) Trump was elected, 2) Zuffa successfully got the jurisdiction of the antitrust case moved to Nevada and 3) WME bought a controlling share of the company. All 3 of those things recalibrated the labor strategy for everyone involved. Leslie Smith, who was at the vanguard of one effort ended up being let go after not taking a fight when her opponent missed weight. In 2018 when Dana met with Trump personally, she sought to use the freedom of information act to determine the contents of that meeting, but it can take month or years for a reply, especially from the White House. Leslie's termination pretty much set the tone.
The important thing to remember is organizing is a marathon, not a sprint. The first part is getting everyone to recognize they're actually all part of the same group. That took years because of the way Zuffa manipulated pay behind the scenes and lied about it. When the sale happened, everyone finally saw just how much this thing was worth, but they had inklings before with the Reebok and Fox deals. Remember also that fighters had been brainwashed to believe unions were the worst thing imaginable because of the Culinary Union having fought for years to keep MMA out of New York, all because of their own battle at Station Casinos against the same shady practices! MMA media presented unions as grubby, greedy and selfish for well over a decade, parroting the official company line. Briefly when MMA was about to be legalized in NY, one of the provisions in the original legislation that was proposed would have added a requirement that any fighters fighting in NY be unionized but smaller promotions cried foul and said that would mean only the big companies would be able to get in because they couldn't afford it. That provision was dropped. Remember that was also in 2016.
The point of all of this is that organizing to collectively bargain comes out of specific historical circumstances of first building solidarity and second listing grievances followed by third proposing a contract then fourth, negotiating with the employer for acceptance of that contract. Getting from step one to two becomes impossible if the regulatory environment precludes it. Add in a media who's mostly loyal to the company, a whole industry of agents and managers who would prefer to keep things as they are, and a bargaining unit of highly individualistic workers and you have all of the conditions for any kind of labor action to be dead on arrival for now.
Nobody jumps ship "overnight" in the UFC while under contract. As soon as the UFC realized fighters were jumping ship en mass, they would start delaying shows and fights to force fighters to stay to make money.
^ This in a nutshell is why there's no union, not a grand presidential conspiracy.
that's not how their contracts work, the UFC have to offer the fighters a certain number of fights per year, they can't just stall the company and stop their fighters having the opportunity to work.
Overnight wasn't literal either, could take 1-2 years for contracted fighters to get out of the UFC.
Wait. The rest is dead on balls accurate? Here I thought it was just a bunch of goofs pretending to understand how to run billion dollar business.
I believe Dana himself mentioned it when talking about Nate Diaz's inactivity. They kept offering him the minimum number of fights but he was turning them all down.
Oh it's like 1 MMA fan to every 100 UFC fans. Twitter is proof of that.
Little is a strange thing to call him. Dude is 6'4.
Worthwhile read:
View: https://twitter.com/LeslieSmith_GF/status/1230767441505996801?s=19
View: https://twitter.com/LeslieSmith_GF/status/1230890460748468226?s=19
View: https://twitter.com/LeslieSmith_GF/status/1230890461742526465?s=19
View: https://twitter.com/LeslieSmith_GF/status/1230890462774358016?s=19
All I'm really seeing is an understandably very upset woman venting on twitter and potentially veering into slander in a couple places.
Notice how she makes it seem like she was on a 3 fight win streak and on her way up in the fight game? Don't fall for it, you're too smart to be duped this easily.
she actually believes the UFC owes her fights if she's a winner
they are just a promotion, no wonder no one is her side.
She was 5-5 in her last 10. I don't doubt for a second that her unionization attempts played a part in her not getting dropped, but it's not like she was a world beater.she actually believes the UFC owes her fights if she's a winner
Indeed, she was never that good but she did do the UFC a favour by stepping up to fight Cyborg. I am wrong in saying no one supported her too, but those involved in trying to force the UFC to change quickly distanced themselves from her, there's a reason no other athletes are referencing Project Spearhead and it's because she's not intelligent enough to avoid lying in her complaints.