Sonnen: Why Liddell and Hughes were fired, Griffin wasn’t

One of their first prominent acts by the new UFC owners WME-IMG was to lay off around 15% of the staff, some 70-80 employees in total, including some of the league’s top executives. That was in July. Earlier this month, there was another round of layoffs that included UFC Hall of Famers Chuck Liddell and Matt Hughes.

There are several retired fighters including Liddell, Hughes, and Forrest Griffin who were appointed to largely ceremonial positions with the company. These were instituted by UFC president Dana White as a means to get fighting legends to stop fighting, for their own safety.

During a recent “You’re Welcome” podcast, Chael Sonnen offered a reason why Liddell and Hughes were let go, and Griffin is still working.

In fairness, if I’m buying a company I’m gonna look and see where the waste is,” said Sonnen, as transcribed by Rory Kernaghan for Low Kick MMA. “If I’m letting Marshall Zelaznik go, I’m letting these two knuckleheads who are on $30K a month, but don’t even live in the state go. Do you know why [Griffin] kept his job?

He was the only one of the three who took his job seriously. What was supposed to happen, from a UFC standpoint, they looked after some of their boys who looked after them. The UFC was getting some bad PR for not looking after their fighters, and they also wanted to give the guys who did carry lifting early on some jobs that last forever. Chuck got the first one, and it’s $30K a month, and he doesn’t have to do anything. This is before the police ran him out of San Luis Obispo, so he wasn’t even in the state. Matt Hughes still isn’t in the state, he lives on the farm in Illinois. These are literally fake jobs.

They give a job to Forrest, and he takes one look at it and decides to take the job seriously. He shows up at 9:00 a.m. on Monday morning and they don’t even have an office for him because it wasn’t a real job. He just kept coming in, and then he started sitting in on meetings. If anyone was gonna keep the job it’s Forrest because he has contributed.