Two fighters, Kimbo Slice and Andrei Arlovski, received huge disclosed paychecks—$500,000 each to be exact— on Oct. 4 for their fights at EliteXC “Heat.” For one of them though, that may have only been the tip of the iceberg.
Deep down in Kevin Iole’s latest mailbag on Yahoo! Sports was this little nugget.
There are unconfirmed reports that Arlovski received a $1 million bonus that raised his overall compensation for the fight to $1.5 million.
Of course, this is “unconfirmed” as Iole puts it, but he is privy to more inside info than the majority of journalists covering mixed martial arts these days. While I don’t always agree with his opinions, he typically doesn’t put something out there unless there’s a fairly good chance that it’s true.
That said, if it is true, wow, that’s an obscene amount of money by today’s standards, especially for someone who lost 100,000 viewers when his fight came on. It begs the question, Affliction, what are you doing? While the fight and the event for that matter gave Affliction a tremendous amount of exposure, there comes a point where the cost/benefit ratio skews the other direction.
Word on the street was that one of the reasons Affliction put Arlovski on CBS was to keep him happy and give him the payday he was expecting when his Oct. 11 fight was canceled. But twice the amount he made in his first Affliction fight, a fight he was arguably grossly overpaid for? Whatever happened to cutting back on fighter salaries, Affliction?
I’m all for fighters making more money, but this has gotten out of control. If Arlovski made for this fight what Fedor made for the Sylvia fight, then you know Fedor’s going to want more money, and don’t forget about Barnett. He was upset he didn’t make it on the CBS card because they “couldn’t get a hold of him” which was likely “we can’t afford to pay them both.” If Fedor and Arlovski are making the BIG bucks, he’s certainly not going to settle for another measly $300,000, unless of course he’s getting million dollar bonuses too.
I’m not going to presume to know what Affliction’s financial situation or what their threshold for bleeding money is, but everyone has a breaking point. I hope Affliction and Golden Boy have a good plan up their sleeves and execute it before they hit theirs.
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The money they are laying out is insane. There is no other organization that can come close to paying these guys all this cash so why pay them so much? I hate to admit Dana is right but he’s got to be taking all of this in just like when bodog demi-god claimed he would show dana what a true show was like and couldn’t sell sh*t on ppv.
Roy got robbed on that stand up when he was in side control. It could have been a bad night for the t-shirt guy if arlovski got tapped.
It truly is. Originally, Affliction said they had to pay out that much to secure the elite-level talent to make a big splash. Whether they actually had to pay out that much was conceded to be a mistake by Atencio like two months later. Why they’re still paying out excessive amounts still is beyond me. My guess is Arlovski was pissed and they were forced to pay him huge money for the Nelson fight or he was going to leave.
Unfortunately, that’s the monster they’ve created. I don’t have a problem with fighters making that much but only if the market allows it. If Affliction was selling boatloads of pay-per-views and could afford to pay fighters big time salaries, then hey, good for them. I would commend them for it, but the market just isn’t there yet, at least not for Affliction. I’d rather see the fighters work with them a little to help build the promotion to the point where those types of numbers are feasible. But I also understand the fighters have to do what’s best for them too, so it’s not very realistic.
It’s definitely a vicious cycle Affliction has to get under control though.
And yes, Roy definitely got robbed. I jumped up and yelled “WTF!!” at my TV screen when it happened. I don’t know that Roy would have won, but Arlovski def caught a huge break.
Meltzer did mention in the an issue in the Observer, that if Arlovski won, his salary would hit 7 figures.
Yeah, you’re right. I forgot about that when I wrote the story. I doubt Iole would have mentioned it if there wasn’t some truth behind it.