Ronda Rousey’s criticisms of the UFC have been a dominant topic within the industry since the announcement of her fight with Gina Carano and have caught the attention of Joe Rogan.
The UFC broadcaster spoke about Rousey’s comments with guest Dustin Poirier on Tuesday and didn’t push back against Rousey’s assertions that fighters are underpaid and that the promotion is not compensating fighters appropriately after its $7.7 billion deal with Paramount.
Look, she made some good points. The most important thing is that she gets the conversation out there, and it puts pressure on the UFC to pay people more and if Netflix can become successful at MMA and successful at pulling fighters away, like right now, they’re doing a one-off and it’s kind of a gimmicky thing … but if anyone’s got that type of money it’s Netflix. They throw around a lot of ridiculous money; they make so much money. They can kind of do that. The question is, are they going to do that more than once? So, if they do that more than once, then what happens is it’s all about the name of the fighters, just like boxing. No one cares if it’s Golden Boy, Bob Arum, no one cares about that; what they care about is who’s fighting who.
If Netflix can kind of do the boxing thing on Netflix with big-name stars, they can be a major player, and that will elevate everybody’s pay scale. So, a lot of people are like ‘Ronda, how can she turn her back on the UFC? Talk shit like that’ – if what she’s saying doesn’t make any sense, then she can’t say it. So, if what she’s saying makes sense, then you have to go, ‘She’s got a point.’
Rousey began negotiating with the UFC in December 2024 about fighting Carano, and the sides were targeting a pay-per-view date around New Year’s this past year. Rousey explained that Carano needed additional time to get ready and would push the fight into the Paramount era, which eliminates pay-per-views for the UFC and was key to the deal. Rousey believed under the Paramount streaming model that they would not be paid what they were worth and took the fight to Netflix and Most Valuable Promotions.
Since last week’s MVP press conference involving Rousey, the former UFC champion appeared at AEW Revolution to confront Timeless Toni Storm and align with Marina Shafir.
Rousey will fight Carano in the main event of Netflix’s first MMA event on May 16 at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California.
