Regular UFC fans are well aware of the bonus system after the fight. Some more dedicated followers of the best MMA promotion may have also heard of discretionary bonuses that fighters have received over the years.
But while the recipients of the Fight of the Night and the Performance of the Night, which were announced for outstanding efforts after each event, take home an announced $ 50,000 apiece, little is known about the discretionary bonuses.
Dana White spoke to The Post on Wednesday about a topic he usually does not discuss: money, in particular the amounts spent on his fight of warriors. This included that the discretionary bonuses had to be thrown slightly.
For most of the 41 events held in 2020, four $ 50,000 “of the Night” bonuses were awarded. Five were awarded on two occasions, and six were given during a particularly action-packed UFC at ESPN meeting in July under the title of middleweights Robert Whittaker and Darren Till. This amounts to a total of $ 8.4 million in announced bonus money.
But the UFC also told The Post that the total bonus payout for the calendar year affected by the pandemic was $ 18 million, including the bonuses previously announced. That leaves $ 9.6 million.
White said the general practice is that for “everyone who delivered the card, I’m writing a check ‘ranging from $ 4,000 to $ 25,000 each,’ depending on what I thought of their fight. ‘
“I’ll give you an example,” White said. ‘There’s going to be an evening where a little crazy happens all over the map, and then we have to choose what we thought [were] the $ 50,000 [bonus recipients], but someone else was running right. They could have gotten it too. And it depends, I’ll write them from $ 10,000 to $ 25,000. ”
With 456 fights contested in the octagon last year – and of course two fighters per game – the average discretionary bonus comes to about $ 10,526 per fighter, per fight.
The announced bonus awards have been set at $ 50,000 since the beginning of 2013, when White said the UFC wants to standardize the figure, which generally ranged from $ 40,000 to $ 75,000 in 2011 and 2012; on three occasions in 2011 the amount reached or exceeded $ 100,000.
White told MMA Junkie in 2013 that the reason for standardizing the value of the bonuses, which he described as a ‘gift’, was in the spirit of fairness for fighters who were not planned on a night when a larger bonus amount has not been handed out.
“It was fair to keep them straight, no matter what card you fight on, it’s the same bonus,” White said at the time, adding that “no one ever complained” about the imbalance in fight card to fight card amounts .
Unlike Performance of the Night and Fight of the Night, the individual discretionary award of bonuses is not made public. Fighters themselves rarely lead the exercise, although in rare cases they give a screenshot of how these bonuses arise. After Justine Kish accidentally became infected during a loss to Felice Herrig in 2017, he talked about how White reached out the next day to go in, and probably realized what she called a bit of humiliation behind what happened. and intimidated, there was an extra bonus coming her way.
“The other thing that’s nice is that Dana hinted that I had a discretionary bonus, which is a gift, for my actions,” Kish told The Domenick Nati Show in the days after the fight. So the UFC is very good at giving little secret bonuses here and there – at least for me. … I did not ask, and did not wonder how much it was going to be or anything, so we’ll see. ‘
White told The Post that he generally does not tend to disclose the amounts paid to fighters, and said he opposed the transgressions of UFC employees to discuss more money.
‘Of course there’s a lot of money involved, and believe me, a lot of people, including people who work for me, have said,’ If you would just say in public what you’re doing, ‘ . “White said. “There’s no one making these guys.”