This Past Weekend<\/a> podcast, Paul was asked if he\u2019d ever work with White and he gave a surprising answer before criticizing the longtime UFC boss.<\/p>\n\u201cI\u2019m open to it,\u201d Paul said. \u201cBuy us. We\u2019ll help you guys not be idiots. The amount of money you would spend\u2014Like, I don\u2019t have an ego. I\u2019ll work with anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n
When host Theo Vonn called White \u201ca very smart guy,\u201d Paul quickly shot that opinion down.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot smart enough,\u201d Paul said. \u201cJust look at what he\u2019s doing. You don\u2019t not pay your fighters, you don\u2019t get Jon Jones on the White House card. First of all, Justin Gaethje is going to lose to Ilia [Topuria] on the White House card. So you have a Spaniard beating a white American on the patriotic White House card. Big mistake, first of all.<\/p>\n
\u201cSecond of all, why are you not going to pay Jon Jones? \u2026 This is one of the most profitable sports organizations in history. Their investors have gotten greedy, they\u2019re in control, they are looking at the P&Ls [profits and losses] and being like, \u2018Yo, we can just keep pumping this shit.\u2019 They forgot their heart as a company and that\u2019s the problem. It\u2019s dying.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just the longterm health of the UFC that Paul is concerned about.<\/p>\n
The UFC has faced increasing scrutiny over its matchmaking and event planning in recent years, with some fans lamenting the lack of star power at the top of the card as well as the constant churn of events leading to lackluster lineups, while others have praised the promotion for continuing to grow its business while providing fight cards on a near-weekly basis.<\/p>\n
In Paul\u2019s opinion, the MMA product is growing stale because of the dominance of wrestling-based champions like Khabib Nurmagomedov and Khamzat Chimaev, as well as poor fighter compensation.<\/p>\n
\u201cMMA hasn\u2019t stood the test of time because the best people wrestle and they just hold on,\u201d Paul said. \u201cKhabib. Khamzat. Which is boring. No one wants to watch that. So it hasn\u2019t stood the test of time. Boxing has been around since the 1500s. MMA is 30 years. It\u2019s declining. Also, because it\u2019s not ran properly and they\u2019re becoming greedy and it\u2019s a super-corporate organization where they\u2019re signed with Paramount, they have stockholders, it\u2019s a part of the WWE. Ari Emanuel. Public company. Blah blah blah.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo when they\u2019re paying fighters 15 percent of the revenue-by the way, down to 10 percent-it\u2019s going down. The NFL pays their athletes 50 percent of the revenue, so if the NFL makes a billion dollars, the athletes make $500 million. In the UFC, it\u2019s $150 million out of a billion, but when you exclude Conor McGregor and Jon Jones from that, it becomes like, 5 percent, $50 million out of a billion.\u201d<\/p>\n
The May 16 Rousey vs. Carano event marks Paul and Netflix\u2019s first foray into promoting an MMA show. Paul has previously worked with the streaming giant to broadcast two high-profile boxing matches against Mike Tyson and Anthony Joshua.<\/p>\n
In 2018, Paul entered the fight game with an established fan base as a popular YouTuber and social media celebrity, with his following having only grown during that time. Having built a resource pool independent of combat sports is why Paul is confident he can afford to treat the athletes he works with better than White and the UFC.<\/p>\n
\u201cMe and [Most Valuable Promotions co-founder) Nakisa [Bidarian] have money from other shit and don\u2019t need to do it and that\u2019s why our motto is always \u2018Fighter first,\u2019\u201d Paul said. \u201cThat\u2019s actually very important, so when you start there, fighter first, and operate as a startup, we instantly took over and resonated with fighters and are clearly the best to work with and make our fighters the most amount of money and give them the highest percentage of the fights, etc.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut on top of that, if you just want to talk analytics, like coming into the game, I have a hundred million followers or something like that and the second-biggest promoter is Dana White with, like, 30. So I\u2019m, like, three times bigger than him.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jake Paul has never liked how Dana White runs the UFC and now he thinks the CEO might…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":591731,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,1347,785,85,787,1396],"class_list":{"0":"post-591730","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-latest-news","12":"tag-mma","13":"tag-sports","14":"tag-ufc","15":"tag-ufc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591730\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}