5th Anniversary of the UFC-Reebok Deal: Opinions on the matter now compared to then?

The Reebok deal is basically cancer--for Fighters, at least. It does nothing to serve them at any point in their careers and essentially just robs them of a retirement fund. It's the sort of thing that gets worse the more you think about it. It's not just slightly bad, it is monstrously bad. However, being a UFC fighter isn't exactly breaking rocks in the workhouse either for other reasons. It's complicated.

Let's break it down:


Firstly, it's metered and tiered. Fighters with1-5 bouts receive  $2,500, 6-10-fights gets 5k, 11-15 get 10k, 16-20 fights get 20k and fighters above get 21 bouts get 20k. Champions get 40k per fight, and title challengers get 30k per bout.

Note that these are UFC bouts only. 

You don't need to be a genius to understand how this is ******y. Firstly, it it doesn't help debutante or emerging fighters at all. 2.5k is chicken scratch. Dana White has actually tried to justify the Reebok sponsorship deal in these terms multiple times,  the argument being that  'At least everybody gets something'.  He has frequently used Boxing as an example. This is a classic fallacy of relevance, because two wrongs don't make a right. It's also not a useful comparison to make, because a salient one would be to compare how much Boxing champions make in sponsorship compared to UFC champions. What Boxing doesn't do is lock fighters into fractional return sponsorship deals and completely restrict their ability to test the waters in other promotions.

Secondly, because an average fighter will fight only around three times per year, they will, by the standards of MMA fighting, be fairly long in the tooth and shopworn by the time they start getting into the higher payment brackets. This is compounded by the fact the more training a fights a fighter endures, the higher the risk of injury which has flow-on effects to the rate at which they will fight. It's a bad coefficient. It's very possible that fighters will never reach the 20k bracket.

Thirdly (and this is the big one) the exchange value is horrific. The more fights a fighter takes, the higher the probability that their marketing value index rises, and the more they are worth in terms of sponsorship. Even the highest brackets of pay at 30 and 40k are pittances compared to what people like Jones, DC, Cerrone ETC could make on the free market. Conor Mcgregor probably spends 20k on hideous suits during fight week. Moreover, the biggest money is made in being a champ or a challenger...and very few fighters hold on to those statuses for more than a few fights.

Reality is, UFC benefits from the Reebok deal and fighters do not. And they benefit from both ends, especially in terms of risk: Unproven fighters are cheap in terms of sponsorship payments, and because payments are tiered and increases  (and decreases) incrementally whilst their marketing value increases exponentially.....they kind of can't lose, and sometimes, as with a Mcgregor, they hit the jackpot and will end up paying a decimal point of a fighter's true marketing value. UFC assumes virtually no risks, fighters assume all of it. To make this worse, UFC  locks fighters into champions clauses etc which makes it impossible for them to Jump ship and earn big sponsorship skrilla elsewhere.

But wait--didn't I say early on that it isn't all breaking rocks in the workhouse? Well, Fighters can promote other products and services outside of UFC events. However, these have to be UFC approved. So you won't find Donald Cerrone promoting Bellator (and I assume any other Redstone-owned thing) out and about in the world.

In summation it ranges from fairly bad to horrible. MMA needs the Ali act or something similar and before this happens exploitation is going to continue to be par for the course. It's also especially horrible for WMMA fighters, because WMMA hasn't been around that long in UFC anyway, and  WMMA fights occur at much slower rates in UFC.

Cowboy was fined a **** tonne for stitching a scrap of his old shorts for luck onto his new ones. So yeah, they don't **** around with this ****, either.

* Edited at 02.02.2020, 5:12 PM ET *

@Hornet the Ali Act would come with its own set of problems, but we already know what those are because they've played out in Boxing. Probably the worst of them would be the fact that the conditions which kind of force the best to fight the best in MMA would no longer exist. The only good thing about UFC is that because it has a virtual monopoly on the industry, it pays the most, and attracts the best talent, who must fight one another, which means we get to incredibly high quality fights between great fighters in their Prime. Ducking still happens in MMA but nowhere near the scale or rate it happens in Boxing, I think we could all agree on that. Additionally UFC pulls its own deck-stacking shennaigans on the regular anyway. Mcgregor getting the title shot over Gaethje for whooping old many cowboy at WW being a prime example.

I disagree with some of your other points. Ultimately, you're either a free market guy or your not, and if you are, you have to accept that workers should have the right to sell their labor to frankly whoever the **** they like in the same way that businesses should have the right to determine whether or not they want to buy it. You can't be a part-time protectionist. UFC is a company roleplaying as a promotion; it kind of treats its fighters like patents or intellectual property and the way I see it, it shouldn't have the right, nor the legal power to do this.Fight Promotions should function in the same way retail stores do; they sell commodities, but they don't own the brands, and don't get to determine whether, when, or where those brands are sold elsewhere.That should be an agreement determined by negotiations between the supplier and the retailer. Same with fighters selling their fights.

The Government does **** things up hand over fist but some level of regulation is important. Laws do not necessarily restrict freedoms; they often create and protect them, too. In the industry we refer to this as positive and negative liberty, and it can get unbelievably complicated extremely quickly. If you don't believe that, then consider the sub-prime crisis Fiasco and the fact that it isn't legal to own slaves. Look, it's just reality that some fighters are going to become superstars while most will never see a grote while getting CTE along for the bargain.There are no industrial relations conditions that can ever prevent this from happening. 

The goal of free markets is to guarantee opportunities. They do not and cannot guarantee outcomes. No market system can do this. This is precisely why every experiment in communism has ultimately failed--disastrously.

The current conditions in MMA violate this fundamental free market principle by essentially limiting the ability of fighters to make the most of their talents, and to generate wealth from those talents as they choose and see fit, to the end of creating greater wealth for what is essentially a company with a complete market dominance.

And as such, I am against this arrangement, and for the Ali act.

* Edited at 02.02.2020, 9:28 PM ET *

I had a pair of reebok running shorts with built-in mesh underwear. Freeballed in them to my local IGA only to notice to my horror that I had ripped them in the corner area of the crotch and a piece of my sack was hanging out while standing in line.

Never again.

would you wear a pair of pink ones with bag fat hairy ****s printed on the fabric, then?

The pair I had were made of some kind of really fine quick-dry material. They were definitely comfortable but not durable. Although most sportswear is like that to be fair.

I don't think Nunes is the manliest. Holly holm has pecs and a mustache. Sits with her legs spread on the train.