Kelsey Philpott has a thoughtful series of posts over at MMA Payout on fighter salaries. The latest installment, which suggests a $10,000 flat minimum wage for fighters, is here:
The SolutionGet rid of the show/win contracts altogether by moving to a flat-fee and institute a minimum fight payout for all UFC contracts at $10,000/fight.How does this meet the interests of the fighters?First and foremost, a UFC contracted fighter entering the octagon four times per year will earn $40,000 before tax and have sufficient funds to cover most of his living expenses. This minimum payout will allow the lower echelon fighters to improve their standard of living and hopefully help them committ to fighting as a full-time occupation.
The question of whether a minimum wage would actually helps fighters is more complicated than the author suggests. A minimum wage would obviously help the fighters currently in the UFC on contracts that pay $3,000 to show and $3,000 to win, such as Goran Reljic. However, it would almost certainly hurt fighters outside the UFC. This is the classic minimum wage problem: You help the people already making the wage, which is an exceedingly small group, but you do it at the expense of a larger group of fighters that would simply love an opportunity to fight on a UFC card for little pay for a chance to make a name for themselves.
Houston Alexander, for example, came in on a $4,000 to fight and $4,000 to win contract. He was almost completely unknown prior to his first fight, and the UFC probably expected to pay him $4,000 to lose. Knowing ahead of time they’d have to pay $10,000 may have convinced them to use a fighter already on their roster, and Houston would have never got the chance that changed his life. I don’t think I’m being controversial when I suggest there are a *lot* more fighters in Houston’s old position than there are fighters in Goran Reljic’s position.
Further, very few fighters remain on the 4k/4k type tracks for long. They are usually signed to two or three fight deals when they are unknown, and if they win a couple fights they make more pretty quickly. Raising the minimum wage for UFC fighters to $10,000 would help a very small number of people for a very short period of their career. The conclusion that it would improve the quality of life for the fighters it applies to depends on the assumption that the UFC would not cut down on the number of fights they offer those minimum wage fighters as well. Even if we assume that, it would almost certainly hurt the quality of life for the many fighters that never get a chance as a result of such a proposal.
In the broader economy, raising the minimum wage does result in a slight increase of the wages that are a bit above the minimum, but the competitive pressures that create that effect just don’t exist in the MMA market. The UFC has too much market share, there’s no reason to believe that under this proposal fighters currently making $7,000 to show and $7,000 to win would be bumped higher than those on Goran’s deal. They’d probably all be bumped to $10,000 flat.
Finally, the classic counter to the economic arguments about minimum wage in the broader economy are basic quality of life issues. Even though most people making it are teenagers, we are concerned with impoverished people without the skills to really get out of their situation, and we know how hard it is to live on such low wages. The situation just doesn’t apply to the MMA world, where a few great performances can get you on TV pretty quickly, and skill really is rewarded directly in the form of bigger fights and higher payouts.
If the Nevada state legislature proposed a law that would apply this minimum wage to the UFC, I would oppose it. It would hurt new fighters trying to break in, as well as the current fighters the UFC decides to fire instead of give the raise. Even if this was done by the UFC on its own accord, there would still be similarly damaging unintended consequences.