“Underpaid fights, where the healthcare rights got them risking all their lives,” Jake Paul wrapped in his ‘Dana White Diss Track’, as argued for better pay. He had a point to make. After all, as per a report by the MMAFA (MMA Fighters Association), the median salary for a UFC fighter was $45,000 in 2020. 56% of them were earning less than $50,000 a year and for the sake of comparison, the minimum salary for an MLB player is $570,599 per year.

One reason for the low pay could be the fact that the promotion lacks a fighters’ union, which puts them in a place where they can’t negotiate better pay. While one would think that top fighters make good money owing to bonuses and PPV portions, how true is this notion? Well, a former UFC fighter, who switched to ONE Championship, has come forward to share his insights.

It is none other than Demetrious Johnson!

Everyone knows the story. Since ‘Mighty Mouse’ was not a huge commercial draw, the retired former UFC flyweight champion was underpaid and despite being a dominant champion in his weight class, he was eventually traded to ONE Championship after his loss in the promotion’s 125-lb division. But people perhaps do not fully understand just how underpaid the GOAT contender was by Dana White and Co.

In an appearance on the Outta Pocket with RGIII podcast, ‘DJ’ revealed the full extent of how underpaid he was going into his title clash against then-bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz on a Fight Night card in 2011. He said:

“When you start fighting in mixed martial arts, it’s not like you become professional your first paychecks, you know, you made $250 to show up and you went $250 to win. Congratulations! I was like I guess I can go buy a laptop at Best Buy now. I mean that sounds great.”

“I worked throughout my whole entire career up until I fought Dominick Cruz and even when I fought Dominick Cruz, that paycheck was $14,000 to show [money], $14,000 to win [money] and I lost that fight. And that’s a world title fight, right—that’s I’m at the Super Bowl, essentially and I made $14,000,” Johnson said.

UFC purses, of course, are divided into two. One part is the show money that a fighter gets for making weight; and the other is a win bonus, given, as the name suggests, only if a fighter wins. Earning $14k in show money for a title fight is quite low. To be fair, ‘DJ’ had only two fights in the UFC before he challenged Cruz for the bantamweight title.

Meanwhile, today, the minimum fighter pay is reportedly around $12.5k to show and 12.5k to win. This means that ‘Mighty Mouse’ made slightly above the current minimum for fighting at the sport’s highest level. However, with time, Johnson’s brilliance was undeniable, and he was eventually able to make significantly more money as he kept on winning.

He further stated, “So that’s why I feel like I found fighting instead of like you know fighting found me, because it was an outlet for me to break up the monotony of life, the 9 to 5. And I was like ‘you know what, I’m going to keep doing it.’ And eventually I kept on winning and then the money got better obviously. 14 turned into 20, then 20 turned into 24, then 24 turned into 100K, then to 350.”

But what happened further? While things did get better, he also lost out on opportunities.

Demetrious Johnson reveals being denied PPV points by UFC despite being champion…

Generally, champions make most of their money off of PPV points. The UFC usually pays champions a share of the PPV revenue based on sales. For instance, women’s strawweight champion Zhang Weili made $650k in base pay for her UFC 300 clash against Yan Xiaonan. But since she got PPV points for the card, she made an extra $1.65 million because of it, making her total payout over $2.2 million.

But Johnson was the UFC flyweight champion and defended his title a whopping eleven consecutive times. Even then, he did not get any PPV points from the UFC until he was finally traded to ONE Championship in 2018.

“I finally got a new contract as champion, and I think it was ($125,000 to show) and ($50,000 to win), but I couldn’t get pay-per-view points. And that’s where a champion makes most of their bang for their buck, is the pay-per-view points,” Johnson said in 2023. “Because if you get on a card with a Conor McGregor and he does 2.1 million buys, then you just do the f–king math. You’re going to make a sh–load of money. I never got the opportunity to do that.”

Thankfully, things have changed for the better since then. Today, the UFC pays its champions fairly well for each fight and gives them PPV points. But Johnson, one of the greatest of all time, was not able to make the kind of money when he fought in the UFC.

‘Mighty Mouse’ is perhaps the most egregious case of the UFC underpaying fighters. What do you think about Demetrious Johnson’s revelations about being underpaid by the UFC?