Starting with UFC 324 Saturday night UFC fighters will have the opportunity to obtain a $100K bonus check. Dana White told Sports Business Journal that the four individual performance bonuses will rise to $100,000.
The UFC will give a $25,000 performance bonus to any fighter who wins by KO or Submission but doesn’t get one of the big four $100K checks.
For most of the ESPN-UFC era, the performance bonuses were $50,000 with no additional announced bonuses for fighters that submitted or stopped an opponent but were not awarded one of the four bonuses for the night. Only in small instances were the bonuses raised (e.g. UFC 300, the bonuses were 300K).
One might infer that the bonuses relate to the new $7.7B deal that TKO signed with Paramount. Presumably, this would allow some of the money to trickle down to the fighters.
On a newsworthy front, White seemed not to know on Thursday about the bonuses. We may infer that the news was to come out today with an embargoed Sports Business Journal story. Many times, companies will give stories to preferred outlets so that they can “break” the news. Notably, SBJ had 3 stories on the UFC in Friday’s daily email of newsworthy items. Coincidence?
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