Issue 152
March 2017
Being a woman in mixed martial arts pays.
The feminist movement should be firmly in its corner. It is perhaps the only sport in the world outside of tennis where being a female will not consign an athlete to the second tier of earning potential.
In fact, it may help them earn more. So many of the sport’s top stars are women now, and their paychecks reflect it.
Four of the names on this 2016 list are female, despite there being four times the number of UFC weight classes for men than women. No worries about equal pay for equal work here and huge progress since the days of Dana White insisting that a woman would never fight inside his Octagon.
With that said, our number one is male and by far and away our top earner for the year. We may even have underestimated the amount he made. He claims to have pulled in $25 million for his latest fight alone. And any fighter lucky enough to enter his orbit in 2016 ended up laughing all the way to the bank.
In a sport where PPV is still king, if you don’t fight in the UFC you have far fewer zeroes on your paychecks – no non-UFC fighter cracks our top 10 – so without further ado, here are our estimated top 10 earners from fighting in the Octagon in 2016.
EDDIE ALVAREZ
$4,872,500
Fight purses: $750,000,
Performance bonuses: $50,000,
Reebok sponsorship: $72,500,
Pay-per-view bonuses: $4,000,000.
Aside from the little matter of getting starched by Conor McGregor, 2016 was a great year for Eddie Alvarez. After gaining the UFC 155lb belt, he had the pleasure of finding himself in McGregor’s crosshairs. While he ended up going down in a blaze of Irish fists, he walked away from UFC 205 with his pockets full.
HOLLY HOLM
$4,322,500
Fight purses: $530,000,
Reebok sponsorship: $42,500,
Pay-Per-View bonuses: $3,750,000.
Last year was both the best of times and the worst of times for Holly Holm. She lost her bantamweight title by suffering her first career loss and was defeated in her only other bout. At least there was a financial bright side as she banked some nice coin from her UFC 196 loss to Miesha Tate.
More championship cash awaits this year if she can take the 145lb title.
JOANNA JEDRZEJCZK
$4,560,000
Fight purses: $430,000,
Performance bonuses: $50,000,
Reebok sponsorship: $80,000,
Pay-per-view bonuses: $4,000,000.
Joanna ‘Champion’ is becoming one of the sport’s biggest stars due to her dynamic personality and performances. After being on the shelf for the first half of 2016 due to coaching on TUF, she made up for lost time, banking big paychecks that surpassed 19 million Polish zloty.
Plenty of scratch to add to her sneaker collection.
DOMINICK CRUZ
$4,090,000
Fight purses: $810,000,
Performance bonuses: $100,000,
Reebok sponsorship: $110,000,
Pay-per-view bonuses: $3,070,000.
Despite losing to Cody Garbrandt, 2016 was quite a year for the former UFC bantamweight king. The financial windfall from fighting on the big Rousey comeback card hopefully helped take some of the sting out of defeat as he reaped the benefits of the second of two champion’s PPV bonuses.
TYRON WOODLEY
$5,010,000
Fight purses: $840,000,
Performance bonuses: $100,000,
Reebok sponsorship: $70,000,
Pay-per-view bonuses: $4,000,000.
Waiting on the sidelines until his promised title shot was granted turned out to be a wise choice for the UFC welterweight champion. ‘T-Wood’ found life with the gold good in 2016, as he finally returned to the cage in July after 18 months away.
After taking the 170lb strap out of Robbie Lawler’s lifeless hand at UFC 201, he had the great fortune of having his first title defense at UFC 205. That PPV cut that UFC champions get came in quite handy for Woodley, who we estimate made the bulk of his income from PPV dollars that night.
Considering the marquee names he’s called out since he seems to like the way they taste.
BROCK LESNAR
$6,586,000
Fight purses: $2,250,000,
Reebok sponsorship: $5,000,
Pay-per-view bonuses: $4,036,000.
Before Conor McGregor was even a twinkle in Dana White’s eye, Brock Lesnar was destroying PPV records for the UFC. His surprise return in 2016 was a financial windfall for the organization and him – failed drug tests be damned.
While the aforementioned test failures cost him a cool quarter of a million, he more than made up for it with an estimated $4m and change from his share of PPV profits. The beast incarnate proved he was still a beast at the box office, by propelling the anniversary PPV over a million buys.
And he did all this without McGregor. Could this cash persuade him to return once his one-year suspension ends? Money talks, and in this case it is screaming: “Yes!”
NATE DIAZ
$9,090,000
Fight purses: $2,500,000,
Performance bonuses: $150,000,
Reebok sponsorship: $40,000,
Pay-per-view bonuses: $6,400,000.
Nate Diaz went from making five figures per fight to seven this year. That’s the McGregor Midas touch for you. But it takes two to tango, and Diaz’s trash talking and fighting skills added up to box office gold.
While Diaz didn’t get a PPV cut at UFC 196, he was shrewd enough to secure it for 202 and was well rewarded.
CONOR MCGREGOR
$32,020,000
Fight purses: $7,500,000,
Performance bonuses: $150,000,
Reebok sponsorship: $120,000,
Pay-per-view bonuses: $24,250,000.
No shocker here – Mr. Conor McGregor, he of the billionaire strut, leads our list of top MMA earners for 2016. While he didn’t quite hit the billion-dollar mark, he still has plenty of reasons to strut – 32 million, in fact.
But as mentioned earlier, we may be underestimating the amount of money he was able to extract from the UFC’s pockets this past year. While ‘The Notorious’ broke records for the highest MMA fighter purse ever reported for a fight – $3 million at UFC 202, which we estimate he surpassed at UFC 205 – his real cash is made at the pay-per-view box office, where we estimate his cut of sales earned him more than $24 million last year.
On the flipside, the three events he headlined in 2016 added more than $120 million to the UFC’s coffers, making the $32 million they handed to the Irish superstar a small price to pay.
MONEY METHODOLOGY
This data is based on educated guesswork about earnings from fights. The UFC is a private company so its pay-per-view numbers aren’t officially released, so that data is based on numbers from respected industry insiders.
UFC fighter salaries, for the most part, are also not made public. Most athletic commissions disclose fighters’ show money and win bonuses, but not ‘locker room’ or pay-per-view bonuses. For those that don’t, we had to estimate. Since UFC fighter contract information is not public, we also had to do some detective work to find out which fighters get a slice of PPV dollars, and how big it is.
We estimate all UFC champions (except Demetrious Johnson, who revealed he doesn’t) and some other big-name fighters (think Brock Lesnar and Nate Diaz) receive a PPV cut for cards they appear on.
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