Several top UFC stars' payouts revealed in lawsuit documents

Bloody Elbow has obtained purse details for several top UFC stars.

There's been a major update into the class action lawsuit against the UFC, with the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denying the promotion's appeal, and likely setting the wheels in motion for a trial in 2024.

With Judge Boulware previously stating he wants the case to be on a "fast track," he also indicated that he wanted all records pertaining to the UFC antitrust lawsuit to be unsealed soon, with very limited redactions for health and contact information.

The uptick in activity in the case also included a number of motions and exhibits that were filed with the court over the last week as part of the legal proceedings. Thanks to the Judge's new orders, most of these filings were unredacted.

Unsealed UFC lawsuit documents reveal financial information

Bloody Elbow has been going through these newly unsealed documents and one of them in particularly was extremely intriguing: Roger D. Blair's re-filed expert report.

Included in the appendix of this report was all of the payouts made by the UFC to fighters from 2011 to 2016. This "Internal Zuffa Bout Compensation" included not only the show and win bonuses and along with Performance bonuses disclosed to athletic commissions and the public, but also non disclosed payments like pay-per-view bonuses, side letters and discretionary bonuses — all the payments to a fighter related to their bout.

Individual fighter names were not attached to each payout, but the report does include how many bouts that fighter has had in the UFC at that point, along with how many fighters received such a payout. That alone made it easy to identify many of the top earners from the UFC.

While it might be hard to identify one of the 4 fighters who were paid $27,000 for their 7th fight in the UFC in 2016, it's much easier to surmise that the fighter debuting in the UFC in 2016 who was paid $1,042,736 for their match was CM Punk, or that of the two fighters that had their 27th fight in the UFC that same year, one of them would be Jeremy Stephens and the other Frank Mir.

With the help of business expert John Nash, we were able to transpose and identify the payouts of several of the promotion's key stars from the UFC's internal compensation list in Roger D. Blair's expert report.

The following purses are determined by matching the payout amount with identity of the fighter that most likely earned that amount. For example in 2013, the only possible candidate for a fighter earning $4,374,326 in his 18th UFC fight in the UFC would have been Anderson Silva. Also, by eliminating fighters who purse info has been revealed elsewhere (such as Brock Lesnar, who's $8 million purse was revealed in the Mark Hunt lawsuit), we can make fairly educated guess as to the identities of some of the other fighters.

The only person on their 20th UFC fight in 2016 that got paid over $3M was Anderson Silva.

Listen to the “Hey Not the Face!” episode on these payouts HERE.

Payouts for UFC's biggest PPV stars

Ronda Rousey's payouts

$574,720 vs. Liz Carmouche 

$1,817,907 vs. Miesha Tate 

$870,969 vs. Sara McMann 

$1,063,688 vs. Alexis Davis 

$1,458,282 vs. Cat Zingano 

$2,642,204 vs. Bethe Correia

$4,476,662 or $4,536,932 vs. Holly Holm

$4,879,766 vs. Amanda Nunes

Notes:

Recently unsealed lawsuit documents also included Professor Robert Topel's expert report that cites payouts for Rousey during the class period: "Rousey was compensated $13 million for participation in seven UFC bouts of which she won six."

This would be from the Carmouche win to the Holm loss, and the total would match the figures we transposed above from the expert report of Roger D. Blair.

Previous disclosures had revealed Ronda Rousey's contract for her last two fights. She would have been paid a $3 million base purse ($500,000 of it was not a title fight) along with a PPV bonus, where she was to receive $1 for every PPV starting at 200-400k buys, $2 for every 400-600k buys, $3 for every 600-900k buys, and $4 over 900k buys.

Conor McGregor's payouts