Arman Tsarukyan and his family may be rich now, but that wasn’t always the case according to his older brother Artur.
Much has been made in the MMA world of the Tsarukyan family’s money. Their patriarch Nairi Tsarukyan is a multi-millionaire through construction, allowing Arman to live a life of luxury while other fighters struggle to keep financially afloat on the way up to the top. The lightweight contender’s Instagram is full of expensive cars, watches, and clothes.
That’s led to many accusations
that Arman is a ‘spoiled rich kid,’ but according to Artur, he and his brother were actually pretty poor through their childhood.
“A lot of people have no clue, they think we were born in a golden cradle,” Artur told Red Corner MMA. “We could say a lot of things about the way we used to live … I think all of us went through this stage of life when we were younger. We didn’t have any wrestling shoes. Like, at all.”
“When we trained together with Arman there were no wrestling shoes there,” he continued. “When we used to come to the city center, we lived in the countryside back then in a sort of ‘ghetto.’ So we came into the city center and saw guys with Asics wrestling shoes. It had a wow effect on us. It’s like Louis Vuitton or something like that now. We just don’t talk about it.”
The family has come a long way thanks to the hard work of Nairi Tsarukyan, and Arman has been pretty open and honest about the support he gets from his family. He’s rich enough to pass on short notice fights, rich enough to buy fancy cars, and rich enough to make $500,000 wagers. But in a recent interview he said he’s not ‘private jet or yacht rich.’ Not yet, anyway.
