Matt Brown: ‘If anyone is to blame for fighter pay, it’s fighters’

The UFC is headed to court in February to defend against charges they illegally suppressed fighter wages over the years by abusing their position as a monopsony in the MMA space. It’s a massive case that could generate major changes, which may not be the worst thing considering the state of the sport under a UFC stranglehold.

Yes, the UFC is doing great. They’re making more money than ever, and they continue to make more money quarter after quarter. The fighters? Not so much. Pay has been locked in at below 20% of revenue for years, and the judge in charge of the upcoming antitrust case rejected a $335 million settlement deal because he felt it didn’t scratch the surface of what UFC owed fighters.

Many fighters wanted the settlement to go through. To them, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, especially when the bush is controlled by a corporate-friendly judiciary. Considering their profession, you’d think they wouldn’t mind a bloody knock down drag out battle. But as former UFC contender Matt Brown explains in a recent podcast, they’ve learned over decades that fighting the UFC on pay is a losing war.

“If anybody is to blame for the fighter pay, it’s the fighters,” he opined on MMA Fighting’s ‘Fighter vs. Writer.’ “And I’m one of them, at least formerly. Like, I never fought against UFC about my pay.”

“You’ve seen it, I’m sure, on Instagram and Twitter, interviews where the fighters stick up for the UFC. I’ve never heard of a business in my life where the employees — if you wanna call us employees, even sub-contractors — where they’re gonna say, ‘Yeah, I shouldn’t be getting paid more. They’re paying me the perfect amount of money.’ Like, that is so unbelievable to me.”

“And look, I’ve always been happy with how the UFC’s treated me,” Brown continued. “I like them. This is, like, no hate against them at all. But if I thought that sticking up for myself and fighting with them about pay would get me paid more, I would absolutely do it in a heartbeat.”

“I only question if guys are saying that because we know the amount of power that we have. Like, if you try fighting against [UFC], your chances of getting more pay just gets diminished. You’re just lowering your chances now of getting more pay. So of course you publicly stick up for them even though something in the back of your head is saying ‘Damn, this isn’t really what I want.’”

Brown was in the UFC for over 15 years and knows how the promotion operates. He lived it, and he’s clearly internalized it to a degree because he went on to repeat the new line UFC brass spouts about how fighting in the promotion ‘isn’t a career, it’s an opportunity’ … to make money elsewhere?

“If you’re an aspiring UFC fighter or MMA fighter, you need to view the UFC for what it is,” Brown said. “It is a stage to magnify your brand so you can make money in other ways. That’s where you’re going to make the real money. Even Conor McGregor, he certainly could have retired just off the money he made in the UFC, but he’s made what 10, 20 times more probably outside the UFC? That’s the way you’ve got to do it.”

“I hope that changes sometime,” he added. “Like where an NFL player only has four years, but as long as they live below their means, which is pretty easy to do when you’re making millions of dollars a year, they can retire just off of four years of playing. In the UFC that’s just not the case.”

There’s no easy answer to the problem, because the UFC isn’t about to pay more unless the market forces them to, and according to the upcoming antitrust suit they control enough of the market to depress pay. We wouldn’t blame the fighters though, although we get what Brown is saying.

It isn’t enough to accept what the UFC gives you, you gotta smile and tap dance about it too lest you be branded as ‘impossible to work with.’