14 Key Details About The Class Action Lawsuit Against UFC

5. UFC Contracts Are An Issue

The suit called into question the exclusivity of contracts, matching periods, and championship clauses. If you're not familiar with the champion clause, it basically ties a champ to the promotion for as long as he is champ. Here's what the lawsuit has to say about that:

The €œChampion€™s Clause,€ which allows the UFC to extend a UFC Fighter€™s contract for as long as the athlete is a €œchampion€ in his or her weight class, preventing the Fighter from financially benefiting from his or her €œchampionship€ status by soliciting competing bids from other MMA Promotions even after the end of his or her original UFC contract term. This clause specifically blocks actual or potential rival promotions from having access to Elite Professional MMA Fighters, which are needed for a would be rival promotion event to be commercially successful. This clause also denies UFC Fighters free agency€”despite their being independent contractors€”thereby retaining the Fighter€™s services for the UFC effectively indefinitely.

They have a point. In the NHL, you can win a Stanley Cup one year, and if your contract is up, you're a free agent, and you can certainly sign elsewhere. There's no requirement to come back and play for the same team again to defend the cup. Don't like the team sports analogy? Well, look at boxing. You can be stripped of a title for not defending it, but you're not tied to any one promoter or organization. Then there's the matching clauses - as noted, the UFC has worked to sign away the likeness of fighter's for life. When the UFC reserves the right to match any competing offer when a fighter's contract is up, what seems to often be missed is that the UFC will still own the fighter's identity, at least to the extent that they can continue to use it in video games and such, meaning the company making the competing offer will be less motivated to make it a high one, since they're losing out on part of the package, so to speak. Another interesting tidbit:

As the UFC gained and then maintained market and monopsony power through this anticompetitive scheme, including by eliminating actual or potential rivals, in or about January 2014, it added provisions€”such as, e.g ., the €œunilateral demotion in pay€ provision which resets a Fighter€™s pay to lower purse levels if a given UFC Fighter loses a bout, and additional restrictions on sponsorship rights€”that further enhanced the UFC€™s control over its Fighters.

In essence, starting early this year, the UFC worked into its contracts the clause that, if a fighter loses, his base pay drops (conversely, it is known to rise with wins). The suit also mentioned, as an example of such threats being carried out, that Randy Couture was at one point airbrushed out of company materials.