You may not have noticed any changes in the way the UFC is operating as they roll into their new big money broadcast partnership with Paramount CBS, but according to former UFC double champ and current commentator Daniel Cormier, the money from the $7.7 billion deal is already starting to trickle down to fighters.
“They’re already getting more money,” Cormier told Josh Thomson on the Weighing In podcast. “People always talk about, ‘What’s the UFC gonna do for the fighter?’ I know guys now, pay per
view is going away. What are they gonna do? I know guys now that are making more money than they did when they were making pay per view.”
That may be because pay-per-view is a dying model, and ESPN putting the ability to pay $80 for an event behind a monthly $13 paywall certainly didn’t help things.
“Pay per views just maybe weren’t selling as much as they used to,” Cormier said. “Whenever we were fighting and I was fighting Jon Jones and and and and Rumble Johnson and and having Nate Diaz on my card, I was making a boatload of money in pay-per-views. That’s not the reality of the world today. Today, a big pay-per-view number is 600 or 500,000. PPVs just don’t sell as much. People are stealing on streams.”
Fortunately, the UFC is already transferring their top names over to a new system of pay.
“They’re doing all these things to where the numbers just work,” Cormier claimed. “I know guys now that said, ‘Hey, can I restructure with the idea that pay-per-views are gone?’ And the UFC was like, ‘Yes.’ And now it’s, like, guaranteed money. They’re doing better. And the guy from the very beginning is gonna do better, and the guy all the way to the top of the card is gonna do better. They’re giving these guys more money.”
That’s what we like to hear, but obviously it would be good to learn more details. As of now there aren’t many — we’ve heard of the UFC restructuring things for top names like Israel Adesanya and Alex Pereira once they lost their belts, but that was at the start of 2025 and didn’t have anything to do with Paramount CBS. There was just no way either man would compete again for the chump change they made before earning championship money.
That’s been the big bottleneck in the UFC’s pay system for years: to make big money, you needed pay-per-view points. To make pay-per-view points, you needed to hold a belt. That’s a clever way for the UFC to lower the number of fighters it has to pay top money to, but creates an environment where no one wants to fight unless it gets them closer to the championship. If all the stars make more money based on the clear metrics generated by Paramount+ viewership, we might see some of them compete more than once a year.
We’ll keep a close eye on fighter pay in 2026 and whether the UFC’s rising tide raises all boats.
