Ronda Rousey has recently talked about the business dealings that led her away from the UFC and into a partnership with Jake Paul’s promotion for her upcoming match against Gina Carano.
The former UFC bantamweight champion and first woman inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame revealed the details during an appearance on the Jim Rome show, explaining how a lucrative deal evaporated once corporate priorities shifted.
The journey began when Rousey, nine months pregnant at the time, reached out to UFC CEO Dana White about competing Carano. White’s enthusiasm was immediate.
“He sent me this voice memo where I can tell when he’s super excited about something because he stutters and he was stuttering all over the voice memo,” Rousey recalled. “I’m like, oh, he’s down.”
She continued: “And so he reached out to Gina and she said that she’d already lost 25 pounds and this was like that walk back into the cage again. It’s something that she’s always wanted to do. And that’s when the talk started happening and got that interest from her.”
White delivered on his promise to secure Rousey a historic contract. “He came back and literally brought me a deal where I would make more per pay-per-view buy than anybody in history,” she explained. “If I hit my historical numbers, which I know we would have been able to exceed, I would have made as much as I did in my entire career.”
However, the timing proved problematic. Carano needed additional preparation time, which pushed the match past a critical business milestone for the UFC.
“It happened to go to the other side of when ESPN deal and their pay-per-view model would be ending and they would be going to stre aming,” Rousey said.
The company’s recent $7.7 billion deal with Paramount and its new status as a publicly traded entity fundamentally changed the equation.
“They didn’t want to set a precedent of giving me the guaranteed money that I deserve because once I raise that tide it lifts all the boats,” Rousey explained. “They just made a 7.7 billion dollar deal at Paramount. So it’s in their best interest actually not to put on the best matches possible, but to spend as little money as possible so they can keep it.”
Rousey pointed to the shift in organizational priorities following the company’s sale. “Dana’s now legally obligated to maximize shareholder value. It’s not just about proving the concept of competing and putting on the best match possible and proving that this is a sport to be taken seriously,” she said.
Rousey continued: “Now that they’ve sold the company, it’s out of Dana’s hands, unfortunately. And now it’s falling onto Hunter Campbell and UFC Corp where they don’t care about putting on the best match possible. They care about putting on the most cost effective matches possible.”
The financial calculations were straightforward from the UFC’s perspective. “It no longer made sense for me to go over there because they didn’t want to pay us the money that we deserve because then for the rest of the time of the deal, they’re going to have to pay everybody else more,” Rousey said.
Instead, Rousey will face Carano on May 16th at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California, with the match showing exclusively on Netflix.
