What a wild couple of weeks Conor McGregor has had.
“The Notorious” missed out on a multi-million dollar fight purse when he was forced to pull out of UFC 303 with a broken toe (seriously). But, he made a decent chunk of those lost earnings back through several shrewd big-money bets on mixed martial arts (MMA) and soccer.
Indeed, “Mystic Mac” banked $1 million off Nate Diaz beating Jorge Masvidal, and then won two more $1 million bets on Spain winning the Euros and Argentina winning Copa. If he continues to be lucky, a United States judge will sign off this week on a $335 million UFC antitrust settlement deal that will pay him around $7 million in illegally suppressed wages.
Maybe …
Nevertheless, that’s more than any other fighter on the roster will get, but McGregor is still being massively underpaid. Because of a legally-questionable arbitration clause added to his contract at some point, he’s only receiving extra compensation for his fights from 2014-2017. The proposed settlement maths out to roughly 20 percent of his total UFC earnings during that period.
For the period from 2017 to 2020, when he fought Floyd Mayweather, Khabib Nurmagomedov and Donald Cerrone? He will only be eligible for a flat fee of $3,000.
This is because at some point during those years, UFC introduced a legal provision in its contracts that prevents fighters from engaging in class-action lawsuits. As a result, only 10 percent of the remaining $215 million, after deducting lawyer fees, is being received by the fighters belonging to the 2017-2020 class who were fortunate enough not to have relinquished their legal rights.
That’s pretty much it: Over 50% will receive $3,000.
UFC antitrust case expert, John Nash, estimated that up to 85 percent of the $1 billion paid to fighters from 2017 to 2020 went to those under new contracts, which make them ineligible for pay adjustments.
“There’s no way you get an amount that small if fighters didn’t sign waivers, the very top guys,” he said on the Hey Not The Face podcast. “So, you’re asking, does Conor McGregor get the money? He should get about 10 percent of whatever he earned in the [2017-2020] period. But, it seems very likely that he might get the amount that all the people that signed the waiver get, which is $3,000.”
The situation is so rough that the judge overseeing the case has suggested he may not approve the settlement because of how little some are getting in money and injunctive relief. That would force the case to a jury trial, where all 12 jurors would have to agree with fighters that UFC used monopsony power to keep pay down.
Experts during pre-trail hearings presented compelling evidence that UFC athletes got bilked out of $1.6 billion in wages, and treble damages could push the punishment for that up to $4.8 billion. So, it’s big-risk, big-reward … and big waits, because even a win for the fighters would be appealed, probably all the way up to the Supreme Court.
However, McGregor has the option to do something quite amusing by choosing to forego the 2017-2020 class and instead utilize the arbitration clause to his advantage.
Nash expressed that opting for arbitration would come with a hefty price tag. “You’d have to bear the financial burden of hiring your own experts and duplicating all the analysis and processes involved in the antitrust trial,” he explained. However, he believed that someone like McGregor could genuinely argue for a $100 million owed by the UFC.
Nash further explained that for fighters who are granted waivers, such as Conor McGregor and others at the pinnacle of the sport, it is not financially viable for the majority of fighters to follow suit. However, he suggested that the elite fighters should consider exercising their right to opt out of the class and pursue arbitration instead.
Would McGregor do that to his friends and business partners at UFC? It’d be a long hard fight that would probably derail the biggest comeback in sports history. But, if UFC tries to slow play him with two fights left on his contract?
Well, there’s always the nuclear option … or bareknuckle.
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