Rogan looks at Reebok Deal worst-case scenario
Joe Rogan: “If I was running the UFC, it would’ve been bankrupt a long f–king time ago. But I think it’s real dangerous looking at the bright side of deals like this.”
On the latest JRE, UFC color commentator and MMA personality Joe Rogan spoke with brothers Chris and Mark Bell. Chris directed the acclaimed documentary ‘Bigger, Stronger, Faster’ and both are powerlifters and entrepreneurs.The trio spoke in a laudatory fashion about the extraordinary rise of the UFC. However, when the subject turned to the Reebok Deal, while praising the prestige of the association with the apparel brand, Rogan expressed reservations.
“They’ve created an industry,” began Rogan. Then Bell said “People are mad about stupid uniforms, that’s the last thing to get mad about.”
The UFC announced late last year that Reebok would become the exclusive apparel for the UFC, and that the NASCAR look for shirts, tees, and banners was coming to an end. It had begun with Spanky’s XXX Playhouse on Tito’s shorts, but evolved into a lucrative income stream for many fighters, rivaling or even exceeding purses for some. And it was also not without a downside, with countless fighters reporting sponsors failing to pay promised sums.
The first figures that floated out were tiered payouts from $5,000 to $20,000 based on tenure:
0-5 fights approximately $5,000
6-10 $8,000-$10,000
11-15 $12,000-$15,000
16-20 $18,000-$20,000
These generated some grumbling, but the attitude was predominantly wait and see.
Some weeks later the figures were officially announced, and were markedly lower.
1-5 $2,500
6-10 $5,000
11-15 $10,000
16-20 $15,000
21-above $20,000
A number of fighters have said the Reebok Deal has resulted in a significant income loss, and Rogan came to their defense.
“They have some points,” said Rogan, as transcribed by Luke Thomas for MMAFighting. “I’m on the fighters’ side when it comes to that. They lose too much money.”
“Tim Kennedy said it best recently. He said on one Strikeforce card he made more money in sponsorships than Reebok paid out for the entire last UFC card… So, all of those people wearing Reebok gear, he made more money from one fight in Strikeforce.”
“I don’t think it’s a good deal for Reebok, because I think it gives them a bad name, in some ways. All of these people are complaining about it, like Tim Kennedy complains, Stitch Duran complains, he gets fired. Lots of fighters are complaining. Brendan Schaub complained. All these different guys complained. That’s all negative press towards their brand.
“They’re not a person, right? They’re a brand. If you associate that brand, you can’t fire the head guy and change the brand. The brand’s still the brand. Everybody’s going to associate that brand with it.
“Is it a big-named brand? Yeah. Is it good to see a big-named brand attached to a sport like the UFC? Yeah, absolutely! But I feel like whenever you’re in a situation where the fighters are going to lose money, that’s always the number-one concern that people have. Everybody knows the window of opportunity for the fighter is extremely small. They have a few years to make some money.
“So when you take some of that money away from them in favor of prestige – the prestige, which is inarguable, Reebok’s a huge brand, it’s great to be in business with a big brand – but if it costs fighters money, you can’t not see that. It’s not like people are going to put blinders on and ignore that. You have to address that.”
“If you bitch about something on Twitter, and someone says, ‘Holy s—! Chris Bell just went off about that!’ And then some newspaper gets ahold of it, and then, boom, it goes viral, on Facebook, people re-post it, Tweet it. We live in a different world. So, anytime someone like Stitch gets fired because he said something about, ‘Hey Reebok, this deal kinda sucks for me because I’m not making as much money,’ they fire him. Then all of a sudden, boom, that becomes a way bigger issue than it was just with him saying that. If he just said that and that was it, it would’ve been a small issue. But him saying that and then getting fired for it, it compounds the issue.”
“I’m not a business person. If I was running the UFC, it would’ve been bankrupt a long f—ing time ago. But I think it’s real dangerous looking at the bright side of deals like this – Let’s look at the bright side. I’m like, let’s look at the worst-case scenario. What’s the worst-case scenario? Everybody’s going to hate Reebok. That’s the worst-case scenario. People are going to mad at the UFC and mad at Reebok. So, I go, ‘Oh, I don’t know about that, man.'”
(54:12 mark)