If Jon Jones makes $30 million for his highly anticipated UFC heavyweight unification fight against Tom Aspinall, that will be way more money than guys like Daniel Cormier ever sniffed in their prime.
That’s according to the former UFC double champion himself, who discussed the rumored fight purse in a new YouTube video.
“I’ll tell you guys right now as a person that has been involved in big fights, a person that has sold pay-per-views, a person that at his time was at the top of the pay scale in the UFC as the heavyweight and light heavyweight champion,” Cormier said. “$30 million was literally a world away from anything we were making.”
“I remember when I got paid in New York, I got a big bump to take a fight on 3 weeks notice, which ultimately became my salary,” he continued. “And people were astounded with the number! But I will tell you, it was a fraction of the number [Jones is] asking for is. It was nowhere near that.”
Cormier is reported to have made $4 million for his UFC 230 win over Derrick Lewis at Madison Square Garden — a fight he limped into with an extremely bad back. It’s unsurprising that he still made the walk despite barely being able to walk, given how much money was reportedly up for grabs. And we underscore ‘reports’ because as Cormier added, you can usually take those numbers and subtract a million or two to find the truth.
“When you hear stuff like, ‘This guy made $7 million,’ generally you go, ‘Well, he probably made about five. Three to five,’” Cormier said of Stipe Miocic’s rumored pay for UFC 309. “But hell, if he’s making $3 to $5 million to fight on that night to go get beat up like he did, no wonder Stipe Miocic said, ‘I’m going to fight.’”
“But again, that is a world away from $30 million.”
We have reliable reports that Jones made $10 million plus a pay-per-view bonus for each of his last two fights, which already puts him into the $12 to $15 million dollar per bout pay range. That’s still half what he wants to fight Aspinall.
“Rogan thinks that the UFC will pay the $30 million to get Jon Jones in there with Tom Aspinall,” Cormier concluded. “I’m not sure he gets to thirty, but if you ask for thirty and you get twenty or you get fifteen, that’s a win for Jon Jones on his way out. Especially living in Albuquerque where everything is so dang cheap. I mean, it’s not like he’s living in California.”
For those of us who have been covering the sport for a long time, it seems impossible that the UFC would actually pay a fighter $30 million. But times are changing, and the UFC clearly understands that it can’t get away with criminally underpaying its biggest stars (too much). The ceiling has risen from $2 to $3 million per fight for the biggest fighters to $7 to $10 million.
“Some of these numbers I’m hearing now, seven, eight, ten [million],” Cormier concluded. “These boys out here getting paid, man, and I’m happy for them.”
The UFC can certainly afford to pay guys like Jon Jones and Conor McGregor $30 million based off the extra cash generated when they fight. And if they want to keep their reputation as the promotion that makes the biggest fights happen, Jones is making sure they pony up.
