Sean Strickland’s contentions with the pay structure at UFC have become very public over the last few weeks. The current UFC middleweight champion has expressed himself, repeatedly online,regarding his dissatisfaction at what he stands to make as the champ over the remainder of his long-term contract with the company. Strickland has been musing, openly, about releasing his title, nuking his contract or fighting his deal out with boring fights. Strickland has also said that he’d like toswitch over to boxing,
where TKO/ZUFFA seems to pay a premium to their athletes.
Lots of the usual talking heads have had their say on Strickland’s situation, including Daniel Cormier and Michael Bisping. Now it’s Demetrious Johnson.
The former UFC flyweight champ is now a professional content creator with increasingly hotter takes as of late.
He talked to Yahoo Sportsabout Strickland and what he would like to see happen next.
“I’ve been in his position before. At the end of the day, I fought through my contract as a champion because I wanted more money, and they weren’t going to give me more money,” Johnson said. Johnson’s claim that he fought out his contract is interesting, since it seemed — at the time — that his active contract was traded to ONE Championships for the rights to Ben Askren.
Johnson said he felt he deserved more money out of the UFC, for how exciting a fighter and dominant a champion he was during his tenure there. After saying all that, Johnson reduced Strickland’s dilemma into a simple binary choice.
“So you’ve got to decide, does he want to fight or does he not? It’s a very simple question. Do you want to fight, yes or no? That’s just how I do business.”
Sounds like a big over-simplification, but OK. Johnson then complained that he made more money during his UFC career, before saying he wasn’t going to complain about it.
“There has to come a point in time where, when is enough enough?” Johnson said. “Do I wish I made more money? One thousand percent. But I’m not going to sit here and gripe and moan about it. What’s done is done. Now, I’m moving forward, and I think when you see an athlete sign for a nine-fight deal, if he’s happy with it, I have to be happy with his decision.”
When he pivoted back to Strickland, Johnson offered another interesting take on the situation. He suggested that Strickland might have signed his new contract, ahead of the Khamzat Chimaev fight earlier this year, while assuming he would lose to Chimaev and thus not have to worry about the championship clause (where UFC gets to automatically extend a fighter’s contract).
Here’s Johnson laying out this theory:
“I [prefer] if he just comes out and says, ‘Hey, this is what I want. The UFC’s not going to give it to me, so guys, I will fight out the rest of my contract, then I will move to boxing. Or, ‘I don’t want to do mixed martial arts anymore. I don’t want to do it because the money’s not good.’ Then he just walks away. You are given options. I’m a black-and-white type of person, right? He signed a contract, and he’s got five fights left in his contract. Maybe he didn’t think he was going to win [against Chimaev], and now he’s stuck in a position where he’s not going to make that type of money he thought he was going to make. I don’t know.”
Johnson then explained that, in his opinion, if Strickland doesn’t want to fight anymore he can just walk out the door.
“He can go, ‘Guys, I don’t want to fight anymore. The money’s shit. I want to make more money in boxing. You’ve seen what Francis [Ngannou] has done. He’s made a shit-ton of money. I want to do the same thing. So you know what, UFC? I’m going to relinquish my belt right now. I do not want to do mixed martial arts, I don’t want to fight anymore. Take the belt, somebody else can fight for this shitty-ass money. You let me know when I can go box and make some real money.’ Why can’t the conversation be like that publicly? That’s how simple the conversation has to be. It doesn’t have to be a long, drawn-out thing. It just can be, this is what I want to do, this is why, here’s my numbers. Here’s my numbers, guys. This is what I’m making right now. Do you guys think it’s [enough]?'”
Ah yes, everyone remembers how easy it was for Francis Ngannou to get out of his UFC contract so he could box. And we all remember how supportive the UFC was about all that and how, to this day, Dana White totally has no hard feelings about it and doesn’ttry to upstage or sabotage Ngannou’s efforts.
When he was fighting, Johnson was among the elites, due to his performance in the cage. He was also a rare fighter who received overwhelmingly positive attention from the fanbase as a great fighter and seemingly great dude. Does Johnson feel that his all-around good guy reputation is somehow connected to his underwhelming payouts as a fighter? If so perhaps these hot takes and heel-turns will help him make more scratch in the content creation biz.
