2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang not impressed with UFC fighter c…

Andrew Yang, 43, is an entrepreneur, huge mixed martial arts fan, and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. He’s not impressed with fighter compensation in the UFC. League president Dana White recently estimated the value of the company at $7 billion. In mainstream professional sports, athletes take something like half of the revenue. In MMA that percentage is a matter of some dispute, but it’s not near half. Yang is not impressed.

I just found it disgusting, because the reason why it’s supposedly worth $7 billion is because they are underpaying fighters by a factor of four, relative to what they should be paying by any common sense standard, said Yang to Marc Raimondi for MMA Fighting. And also by the standards of other major sports. So Dana White is talking out of both sides of his mouth. He’s like, ‘MMA is going to be the biggest sport in the world, MMA is the biggest thing,’ and then he’s paying people 10, 12 percent of revenues when every other major sport is paying between 47 and 51 percent.

So, I just got angry about that. That Dana White is such a moron, honestly. Because if you’re going to exploit workers, you might want to keep that valuation under your hat. That to me is fairly common sense. … This is a national story, but it’s getting buried because it’s MMA.”

Celebrity investors in the WME-IMG now Endeavor owned UFC include

Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Sylvester Stallone, Mark Wahlberg, Ben Affleck, Rob Dyrdek, Tyler Perry, Trey Parker, Michael Bay, Guy Fieri, Adam Levine, LL Cool J, Michael Flea Balzary, Anthony Kiedis, Calvin Harris, The Weeknd, Robert Kraft, Tom Brady, Cam Newton, Serena Williams, Venus Williams, Li Na, and Maria Sharapova. Former UFC women’s bantamweight Leslie Smith is attempting to organize fighters through Project Spearhead. Yang believes pressure can be put on the celebrity owners.

UFC fans may or may not care, said Yang. A lot of folks at WME may or may not care. But a lot of these celebrities would care a lot. And a lot of these celebrities know that if it was the case that their fans knew that they were personally profiting from Donald Trump screwing individual fighters, like Leslie Smith, out of their livelihood, that would be a huge problem. Then they would look at their agents and be like, ‘What did you get me into?’

They’ve benefited themselves from really significant industry bargaining power and then they’re passively siding with centimillionaire Dana White, who is nickel-and-diming the Leslie Smiths of the world. It’s deeply screwed up. … I see that most of these fighters are working their ass off to make chicken scratch. They should be getting paid four times more. Their agents are certainly complicit. In my opinion, these agents did not do their jobs by pitching this investment to these celebrities knowing that the valuation is based upon a clearly exploitative labor market.