Once again, here we are, talking about fighter pay in the UFC. If anyone isn’t seeing the trend yet, I don’t even know. This has come up so many times now in recent memory that it’s hard to ignore. Granted, this time around it is coming from one of the Diaz Brothers, Nate Diaz.
I’m not saying that to discredit his claim, but am saying it because he just signed a new contract with the UFC, one that involved him getting six figures upfront, then $60k to show, $60k to win. For someone like Nate Diaz this should be considered pretty good money. If this seems random to you, assume that this is about Nate Diaz just paying his taxes, which for a freelancer or contractor, tax season is literally the worst part of the year. I can’t stress this enough; tax season sucks when you don’t get your taxes taken out of your paycheck. [source]
“If I can get released, I can go fight somewhere and make some money. If they can renegotiate, I can make some money, because right now I’m broke. For some reason, the IRS is telling me that I owe them more money than I have right now, and I pay my taxes every year.
“At this point, they’re having a fat-ass party with others getting paid and they’re letting me see it. Before, I had no argument because I didn’t really know. But now they’re letting me see the party and letting me in. So now that I know for sure, I’m going to talk. If everybody would start speaking up and quit keeping their mouths shut, people would start getting paid. We’re working for a billion-dollar company. It’s ridiculous. I go to boxing events where they pay the fighters so much money and those boxing events aren’t even half the shows that the UFC is.
“The crazy thing to me is that in what other professional sport do the cheerleaders make more than the athletes? I’m sure Arianny Celeste, Brittney Palmer, Joe Rogan, Bruce Buffer, probably you, everybody makes more money than I do. So I’m trying to make a move here. The way that the UFC makes me look, too, makes people I know believe that I’m some type of millionaire. I got a family to feed. I got my mom. She just got a brand new house and working two jobs still. I’m trying to break her off some money when I can but I’m going as broke as her.”