Joe Rogan has renewed his criticism of the UFC’s practice of dividing athlete pay into show money and a win bonus, arguing that the system places too much of an athlete’s financial future in the hands of judges.
During the JRE MMA Show #184 episode with former UFC champion Aljamain Sterling, Rogan questioned whether the win bonus actually encourages fighters to perform more aggressively. In his view, athletes competing at the highest level are already giving everything they have, regardless of how their contracts are structured.
“It should be you get paid what you get paid,” Rogan said. “It shouldn’t be” dependent on a separate payment being awarded after the result.
Rogan argued that athletes are already motivated by competition, pride and the desire to win. A bonus, he suggested, does not make a professional athlete push harder in the cage. Instead, the arrangement can leave an athlete with substantially less money after a demanding contest, particularly when a close decision goes against them.
“You’re not incentivizing people to fig ht harder,” Rogan said. “You’re giving too much of their career, too much of their future, too much of their actual like how are they going to feed their family to the whims of people that sometimes get it wrong.”
Sterling agreed with the broader point but recalled one occasion when a financial incentive affected his mindset. Before his UFC 300 bout with Calvin Kattar, UFC president Dana White announced that the event’s performance bonuses would be $300,000. Sterling said the announcement energized him and made him consider pursuing a more aggressive performance.
However, Sterling also acknowledged that the contest did not unfold as he hoped. Kattar’s tactics limited the opportunities for sustained exchanges, demonstrating one of the problems with tying pay to entertainment value or a specific result. Two highly skilled athletes can neutralize each other, even when both enter the contest with the intention of producing an exciting performance.
For Rogan, the central issue is fairness. Athletes should be rewarded for the work and risk required to compete, rather than having a significant portion of their income determined by a decision that may be close, disputed or influenced by factors outside their control.
