Following the announcement of UFC’s $7.7 billion dollar media rights deal with Paramount CBS, UFC CEO Dana White said there’d be changes coming to the bonus system. And while the move to Paramount+ doesn’t kick off til the start of 2026, we witnessed a small change to bonuses at UFC 319.
Following Carlos Prates’ massive spinning elbow knockout of Geoff Neal (watch it here), Joe Rogan told the Brazilian fighter in the cage that he’d won a $50,000 performance bonus. Then Lerone Murphy hit his own spinning elbow KO on Aaron Pico, and again Rogan told him he’d banked $50k.
“Those two fights were like, yeah, holy sh*t,” White said. “And I knew nothing before had beat it and if anything else else was crazier than those, I’d have paid the money. I’d have just said, alright.”
“When sh*t like that happens again, yes, that will be a new thing that will happen moving forward,” he added. “I mean, if those fights were the second fights on the entire night, I would have said the same thing.”
“Somebody would had to been decapitated to [beat that], you know what I mean? I don’t know what would have been bigger than what happened in those fights.”
White was also asked if the UFC was considering changing their system from having two performance bonuses to awarding bonuses for all finishes. He didn’t sound too interested.
“Finishes are a part of it … I think you have to mix everything into the equation,” he said. “A great performance, you know, I don’t wanna put myself in a box with just finishes.”
He was even less interested in a suggestion that UFC do away with splitting fighter pay into show and win money.
“Listen man, this business has worked just fine,” he said. “The model isn’t broken. I love when people who have no f*cking idea what they’re talking about and don’t know anything about the business give input. It’s fun.”
Here’s hoping the system changes so that everyone who pulls off a ‘holy sh*t’ finish gets a bonus without having to worry about getting upstaged later in the night.
