When I was 24 years old,
I saw the UFC on a pay-per-view on TV.
And I was so overwhelmed by the athleticism, the skill.
And then at the end of the fight, the combatants hug,
they shook hands, and I just fell in love with it.
Part of UFC's appeal is it doesn't
look like a balletic display of marshal talent and mastery,
as much as it looks like a bar fight.
We choose to do this because we love the sport,
but it is a business.
And if you do not treat it like a business,
I guarantee you that the promoter is.
And you will be left broken,
broken at the end of your career.
Each of us have an individual story,
but as with anything,
you take enough of these individual stories
and you see not only crossover, but intersectionality
A group of former UFC fighters
that are suing the UFC
scored a key legal victory on Thursday
when a federal judge said he would grant
their lawsuit class-action status.
There have been in fights in every major US sport
about workers' power in the labor market.
I don't think there's a guy in the sport,
from the guy who just got his first fight,
all the way up to the Conor McGregor's,
that is pleased with the way the UFC treats fighters.
The way we've been strong-armed, the way we've been coerced.
Fights over unionization in some sports,
fights over free agency in baseball.
And in boxing, the Mohammad Ali Act,
which restricts the kinds of contract terms
that can be imposed on boxers.
The fighters who brought this lawsuit
see it as the continuation of a tradition in sports
of athletes fighting to have agency
and power in the terms of their work,
and who they do it for.
Mixed martial arts used to be pretty culturally
and legally fringe in the United States.
It was banned by most states.
John McCain had famously called it human cockfighting.
There are some rules in the UFC, but to a large extent
all sorts of body parts, and tactics, and attacks
are on the table, and people get seriously injured at times.
My nose has been broken multiple times.
I had my right pectoral torn off,
had to get that reattached.
I've had my jaw broken in two places.
I've had my neck broken.
I had my left ankle broken, had to get that repaired.
I've had a torn right labrum in my shoulder.
He broke my eyeball.
I mean, the bone that holds up my eyeball.
I've had my left eye orbital fracture twice,
where my I caved in.
I was swallowing my own blood.
And I knew, don't blow your nose or both eyes will blow.
At the time that UFC was bought for just $2 million
by the former boxing coach, Dana White, and a casino owner
he'd been friends with, Lorenzo Fertitta,
and his brother, Frank Fertitta, UFC was struggling,
as were other mixed martial arts promoters.
It was pretty much a fixer upper.
The money that they spent to actually purchase it
for $2 million was much less than the money
they quickly had to sink into it in order to revitalize it.
They pulled off a multi-pronged strategy
that was quite successful.
First, they did what White has referred to
as running towards regulation.
They found ways to make compromises with state regulators
so that the sport would not be illegal.
And at the same time, they also popularized it.
They made gambles like paying
the production costs themselves
for the first season of a reality TV show,
"The Ultimate Fighter" on Spike TV.
It's all over, it is all over!
Diego Sanchez is the ultimate fighter!
UFC, under Dana White, had a gift for weaving
compelling personal narratives and rivalry.
People throwing shoes,
a guy coming to the octagon with
"Who Let the Dogs Out" playing
while he was dragging another guy on a leash.
♪ Who let the dogs out? ♪
♪ Woof, woof, woof, woof ♪
My first contract with the UFC
is kind of an interesting story,
because here I am on this reality show,
"The Ultimate Fighter,"
and they started to realize how big of a stepping stone
this was going to be for the UFC.
Sat us all down individually,
put a contract in front of us and said,
hey, we realize that this is gonna be huge.
And we really wanna have you all a part of
the UFC family moving forward.
So we wanna go ahead and get this out of the way.
Just sign this simple contract
and we'll be able to move forward as one unit.
But as I'm looking at this thick contract
and wondering what I should do,
Dana White looks at me and says, don't worry.
If this thing takes off we'll take care of you.
The fighters would say, at the heart of UFC's power
is the contracts that it signs with fighters.
Before boxing had competition
boxing used to be dominated by a few dominant promoters.
And the contracts were ported over from boxing.
And the contracts are basically designed
to control every aspect of a fighter's career.
They're long-term.
They last multiple fights.
Fighters, under these contracts,
are bound to fight only for UFC for a period of time.
And UFC can extend that time
if a fighter declines a match,
or if a fighter gets injured.
They control who the fighter fights,
they control when the fighter fights.
And then they have a number of different clauses
that make it very difficult for a fighter
to ever break free from the UFC
if that fighter ever did want to become a free agent.
Contracts are so one-sided,
there really is no negotiation room for any of the things,
especially as you're coming up, and as their stranglehold
on the sport of MMA got so much stronger.
Part of what's at the heart of this lawsuit
is the ways that UFC successfully
took other competitors off the board.
The UFC has such a stranglehold
on mixed martial arts.
And as they were buying up so much of the competition,
shutting them all down, they really became the only option
for anybody that wanted to do this professionally.
If you follow Dana White's Twitter,
or watch him on YouTube,
you could've seen Dana White calling himself
the Grim Reaper, and bragging about
how he has defeated, or derailed, or acquired
one after another company
that tried to compete with the UFC.
In 2011, UFC acquired Strikeforce, which at the time
was the most prominent rival still standing.
Cung Le is unbelievable.
It was a great fight.
Let's hear it for them one more time.
Scott Smith and Cung Le!
The CEO of Strikeforce, Scott Coker,
has said in the past that he saw himself like Luke Skywalker
up against the Death Star, trying to compete with UFC.
Eventually, when Strikeforce was bought out by UFC,
my only option was go to UFC
'cause they had the rest of my contract.
Now I'm under a contract where it's only
an 18 month contract with six fights.
But five years later, I'm still stuck in the contract.
Dana White, president of--
The month before UFC's parent company, Zuffa,
completed its acquisition of Strikeforce,
a UFC executive sent an email.
And the subject line of that email was, We Own MMA.
And the UFC has admitted in documents
that have now become public, that they've almost
never lost a fighter that they wanted to keep.
In internal UFC emails we now know
the company referred to what it was doing
as choking off oxygen to the competition.
The most important oxygen that UFC allegedly
ran afoul of the law by cutting off to its competitors,
is the fighters themselves.
And not only did they make it clear to us,
they made it clear to the whole mixed martial arts world.
There is no negotiating.
These are our very strict, never-ending contracts.
And that's the case to this day.
UFC just says, oh, you wanna fight for us?
You sign here.
If you don't want to,
we've got 20 other guys that'll take your spot.
They have 70, 80, 90% of the top fighters
under exclusive contract.
Meaning that those fighters are not available
to any other MMA promoter.
And fighters, even if they wiggled their way out
of the very restrictive contracts that UFC imposed on them,
didn't have another professional mixed martial arts option
because there weren't robust rivals
to go sell their work to.
On Tuesday afternoon, a class-action lawsuit
was filed in US district court in San Jose
against the Zuffa LLC with fighters Cung Le, Nate Quarry,
and Jon Fitch attached to the suit.
Rampage Jackson came to me, he says, hey Cung,
I know this lawyer.
He will help get some fairness for the fighters
in the marketplace.
And I decided I wanted to step up
for all the fighters that are being affected.
At the end of 2014, more than six years ago now,
a group of now all former fighters
filed a anti-trust class-action lawsuit against UFC.
And in broad terms, the case is an anti-trust case,
where we're claiming that the UFC
is both a monopoly and a monopsony.
Usually when we talk about monopoly,
we're talking about the power that a company has
when it becomes the only one selling something.
Monopsony is about the power of being
a monopoly purchaser of something,
and particularly a monopoly purchaser of labor.
A key argument in this lawsuit has been about,
as UFC succeeds, and its revenue soars,
how much should we expect that, absent illegal conduct,
the fighters pay would soar as well?
In UFC, year after year,
the share of the company's revenue
that goes to actually paying the workers
doing the fighting has hovered around or below 20%.
And what this analysis shows
through complex statistical regression modeling
is that if the UFC was competitive,
and did not allegedly violate the anti-trust laws,
it would pay its fighters 50% or more
of the revenues it's generated, just like baseball,
just like hockey, just like basketball, boxing.
If instead of paying 20% of the revenues generated
it paid 50% or more of the revenues generated,
the fighters would have made $1.6 billion more
during the period that we measured, 2010 to 2017.
Sometimes when you write about allegations
against companies, and particularly about lawsuits
against companies, those companies
don't wanna say a whole lot about them,
or are pretty dismissive of the significance
of litigation against them.
UFC, in their comments to me,
has been pretty feisty about this.
Saying that they see this lawsuit actually
as a threat to the ability of businesses
to take risks and succeed.
And that they don't wanna roll over,
that they want to fight it, and they want to defeat it.
The fighters I talked to described having side jobs,
being reliant on UFC in part because,
after taxes and expenses, they weren't
making enough money to feel financially secure.
The overview of my career from a financial perspective
is something I've had a challenge in admitting.
I can tell you now that I lived in my mom's detached garage
the entire time I was fighting,
and I had a second job as a bouncer and a bartender,
a third job as a personal trainer, just to make ends meet.
Nate Quarry told me that over his time in UFC
he fought fights while he was tens of thousands of dollars
in debt coming into the fight.
It gets so disheartening because I've seen fights
that are called the fight of the year.
This is just this brutal war.
And they battled for four and a half rounds
until one guy's body just gave up.
And then you find out, oh,
that guy made $60,000 for that fight.
In one of the hearings in this lawsuit,
UFC's attorney argued that
if the fighters were really the product,
if all that UFC were selling were the fighters,
then the fighters wouldn't need UFC at all.
That a fighter is not themselves the UFC product,
any more than an Apple engineer
who makes a cool iPhone is the product
that Apple is selling.
We the fighters make this whole thing happen.
And it's been driven by Chuck Liddell,
it's been driven by Randy Couture,
it's been driven by Conor McGregor,
it's been driven by Brock Lesnar.
It's been driven by all the greats that have walked
before us and that walk this path right now.
We are the product.
If the fighters are not the product,
then go ahead and release us from our contracts.
You'll do fine without us, clearly.
It's the identity, and rank, and popularity
of those fighters that attract the eyeballs
and make the sport what it is.
And if you can lock all those up
and keep them from other promotions.
William Isaacson, a lawyer for UFC,
said in a statement that UFC has spent many years
building a world-class organization,
enhancing the brand of our athletes,
and championing the sport of MMA.
UFC pays its fighters more than any other MMA promoter,
with average fighter compensation rising
by over 600% since 2005.
Our efforts have raised the global popularity
of the sport and the overall revenue potential
of all MMA organizations and athletes.
In December of 2020,
the judge announced a crucial step in this lawsuit,
which is that he is going to certify it as a class-action.
Class certification makes this lawsuit
a much more significant threat to UFC.
And the judge made clear long before
saying how he planned to rule,
that he expected whatever he did to be appealed
into Federal Appeals Court,
and on from there to the US Supreme Court.
So we are likely in for many more months
and years of wrangling over this.
Kyle Kingsbury said that he doesn't think any settlement
would be acceptable unless it includes
a change to the restrictive contracts that UFC uses
to keep fighters bound to the UFC.
My son's about to turn six years old
and it started when he was in the womb.
You know, we're in this thing to the end
to change the sport forever.
We want the same freedoms that are offered
in any other major sport.
We are, every other major sport has gone through
what we're going through right now.
People tell fighters, you know, just shut up,
look at how lucky you are.
Well no, actually, we're fighting for what we believe in.
We're gonna continue being fighters.
And that's how we're made.