The Professional Fighters Association is making waves after its announcement last week of its formation and intent to unionize UFC fighters. Jeff Borris has made the media rounds and announced a press conference set for Thursday in Las Vegas.
Maybe in direct or indirect response, the Mixed Martial Arts Fighters Association (MMAFA) has released a statement via its Facebook page.
The Facebook statement goes on to address the issue of agents involved in organizing fighters:
Agent efforts to organize and agent involvement in association operations suffer from two fatal conflicts. First, agents vigorously compete with each other, creating divisions preventing successful formation and operation of the association. Second, agents appropriately view all issues through the lens of “my clients.” Association efforts, on the other hand, must be viewed through the lens of all member fighters.
PFA’s Borris is a sports agent and is a part of an agency that represents the Diaz brothers. The obvious inference by the MMAFA in its post is that agents should not be involved in efforts to organize fighters due to conflicts of interest.
Borris said in his interview on The MMA Hour that he is not opposed to MMAFA and believes that their mission differs from PFA.
Payout Perspective:
It’s clear that PFA and MMAFA are, or will be in the near future, on a collision course. Both want to organize fighters. PFA wants to unionize just UFC fighters while MMAFA is looking at a broader base of MMA fighters to organize in an association. Who is right? Who is wrong? What opposition will they face aside from each other? Time will tell.
This will be the weakest union ever and the most pointless one. I don’t understand how they can have any leverage over the UFC! How can they effectively protest? Venues move around the world. YOu can’t effectively picket those events. The cost would be enormous. With main events being the primary selling point of events. It’s woukd be very easy for the ufc to pay 2 name fighters to cross the picket line so to speak and use local fighters on the rest of the card and carry on business as usual. A 1 year strike for a fighter would have huge lasting effects on his career. The top fighters have no incentive to join a union who will redistribute their salaries to lower level guys as well as charge them massive dues when they are the primary draw responsible for all the revenue.
Between WME and the Ali Act, going to be tough.