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By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief
"Per fight, yeah, I'm going to take a little bit of a cut, sure. I think my pay grade with the Reebok deal is, $20,000, or $22,000. So, comfortably, [I'm] saying that I'm going to be losing $60,000 a fight probably... Budweiser, along with Fram and others are on board with the UFC and Reebok, so I kind of lucked out. I got lucky and all my sponsors are sticking by me. We'll figure how to make it work outside of the UFC. No, I'm not going to be making the big money on the fights like I am now but it's all going to work out. Budweiser is a year deal with me, so I guess fortunately for me I'm getting paid regardless.
...I think the Reebok deal…you know, the first couple of fights, the first year, is gonna be kinda shaky ground while they figure everything out. But I think it's awesome. And like I said, there' s a lot of people that were looking for sponsors and who were fighting for $500. Now they know – I mean, I don't know how the pay is gonna work, but I'm sure the UFC is going to send a check, or Reebok is going to send a check right away. It's not going to be like fighting for pennies again; knocking people out and then calling, 'Hey, it's been 90 days, where is my check? I don't have it. I need it.' So, it's going to be good for everybody and once they figure everything out, I think it's going to be just fine."
-UFC 187's Donald Cerrone admits he'll be losing a significant amount of money per fight via the Reebok deal as it's currently laid out, but also somewhat toes the company line in an interview with Yahoo! Sports.
Penick's Analysis: Cerrone's one of those names who will have the opportunity to make up for it with the deals he's got outside of the cage, but he's a unique case as well. There are a lot of fighters at the moment whose sponsors will dry up without a way to get them exposure during a UFC fight week or on the broadcast itself. That's the reality for most of the roster. And from the way that many have discussed it since the numbers were announced, there were a lot of fighters making over the bottom tier with just their banner and short sponsors, so that income is absolutely not being supplemented by this deal the way that Dana White initially wanted to claim it would be. They've already been open to change once in this situation when they shifted from rankings to tenured tiers, but it needs to be broken down even further so more fighters have a chance to reach a higher level tier on this deal. Right now, a vast majority of the fighters are in the bottom two tiers, and only very few of them will ever make it to the $20,000 range, which is just unacceptable.
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Jamie Penick, editor-in-chief
(mmatorcheditor@gmail.com)
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