Jake Paul has commented on Conor McGregor’s pay figures coming out via anti-trust lawsuit documents, and his statement is a mix of derision and empathy.
The UFC keeps its fighter pay numbers a closely held secret. Even when you get ‘official’ figures from one of the few athletic commissions that still releases those, there’s plenty of ways for the promotion to hide extra money. So we never really knew how much the biggest UFC stars made.
That all changed yesterday (Thursday, November 2nd) after a new pile of discovery documents became publicly available. One of those docs contains the unvarnished pay figures for all the UFC’s top fighters from McGregor to Ronda Rousey to Georges St-Pierre and Jon Jones.
The UFC may use every bit of wiggle room they can to fudge numbers, but that’s a recipe for disaster in an anti-trust lawsuit. The promotion is being accused of being a Monopsony, which is a company so big it warps the market in its favor.
McGregor is by far the largest star in the UFC, and these documents showed that he made between $3 and $6 million per fight.
“This is f—ing hilarious and sad at the same time,” Paul wrote in a since-deleted tweet.
While the current anti-trust lawsuits deal with specific time periods before the explosion of Influencer boxing, the paydays being made by these young YouTubers is definitely relevant to the case. In a market without distortions, the UFC would be forced to pay their stars a much larger share of revenue. Documents currently have that number sitting around 18%, way below other sports where the number is closer to 50%.
As for Jake Paul? He reportedly made $3.2 million guaranteed for his Tommy Fury fight plus 65% of pay-per-view proceeds. One of the advantages of running your own promotion, for sure. But for him to be making roughly the same as McGregor in any capacity? That is f—ing sad.
This story originally appeared on MMA Mania
