Secrets of the Business Dana White and the UFC antitrust lawsuit

Author:

Chael Sonnen

Keywords:

MMA,mixed martial arts,Chael Sonnen,UFC,Bellator,Ultimate Fighting Championships,Bellator MMA,MMA Fights,MMA podcast,Beyond the Fight,Chael Sonnen podcast,mma fights,Fighter,Bad Guy Inc,Dana White,Promoters,UFC Monopoly,SUG,SUG 8,Submission Underground,ZUFFA,Antitrust lawsuit UFC,UFC antitrust

Subtitles:

I ended up while doing submission underground okay now I won't tell you who this conversation was with but I ended up in the process of putting this together in a discussion about the UFC and the antitrust lawsuit and these fascinates me because they are made by the most simpleton the most basic of thinkers but there's a lot of them and there's power in numbers and if you can get a whole bunch of people together that don't have their thinking cap on you can start to get a whole bunch of voices and all said you got to go address something right I mean it's just the way the world then you got to go dress something so I do I sit back in these situations I do a little bit more talking a little bit more listening than I do talking but I got a couple of these knuckleheads in front of me and they're pleading their case for me and they're saying things like this is not how major sports are done and they start talking about the NBA and the NFL and they start talking about hockey and they start talking about baseball tell me how sports are done and the UFC is not doing what things the way that sports are done and I just sit back and listen and I never take the time to correct them but inside of course because I'm a little bit more of a sophisticated thing I haven't the foggiest idea what your point is are you attempting to compare Dana White to sports guys because if you are I want to know what you get that basis from the only basis that you would have to possibly compare Dana White to other sports guys is the fact that Dana White comes out and tells you he's in sports Dana was a little kid once that might surprise some of you he was a young man one time that aspired to grow up and do something guess what that was those aspirations happened to be to be in the fight game now that changed over time first he wanted to be a fighter himself wouldn't be competitive fighter himself then you say you know I want to be a manager on this and he goes do you know what let's take is take over the whole damn thing so you might have heard possibly even from Dana himself that he is in the sports business but you will not hear from any legal mind out there or any objective think of out there that he's in the sports business or ever has been in the sports business or can be compared to anybody else in the business of sport from unions to collective bargaining to to rights to distribution to it phenomenally and exponentially different merchandising deals there's nothing about that that you're gonna compare other sport with this nothing and he could tell you till he's blue in the phases in sports he's not he's an executive producer of content and you could put the business practices that he does against any other executive producer of content from the beginning of time to present time and for the rest of time and it is 100% hand in hand 100% with a slight caveat that early in his career perhaps before he smartened up in fairness perhaps he eventually got a little bit better advice but at one point in his career he allowed his talent who he hired and paid to go out and get their own sponsors and keep 100% of the revenue that never should have been done guys I am on the boys side I stand with the guys in the locker room I do not stand with the corporation but I also stand the world of objectiveness and fairness there is no executive producer of content in the history of time that allows his paid talent to go out and get their own sponsors should anybody ever do that should Martin Scorsese one day do that should Bruce Burnett someday go out and do that which they won't should they in a hypothetical world if we could ask those guys right now should Steven Spielberg go out there and do that he will be taking a cut and believe me he will be taking the lion's share but if you come to him and say hey I got this deal and it's all mine and I'd really like to do it he's gonna go great you take 20% you bring me 80 and go ahead and wear that watch in my next movie that's the way that's going to go in an absolute best-case scenario of which isn't even gonna happen that was the one thing so when he finally lined up with exact executive producers of content he had to take that away that I've never seen anybody more guilty of the expression no good deed goes unpunished I just simply never seen it guys I work on ESPN if I took a suit deal okay buying a suit company come to me and say Chael we will pay you X amount of dollars as long as you wear our suits on ESPN and I do a side deal with them that I do not bring to my boss at ESPN I will be out the door so goddamn fast my head would spin and if I tried to contact any attorney for wrongful termination they would hang the phone up on me so fast I can't really express to you guys you cannot do that and for a part of his career I'm talking about Damon he let guys do that I do hear on that this argument of the antitrust so many things but they're in left-field and they continue to compare to other sports they need to compare the business of the UFC for what it is and to other like-minded in equal businesses and check those practices I've heard the word Monopoly thrown out guys there is executive producers of content every 15 feet in certain cities in this world you happen to be talking to one right now by the way I produce this content you happen to see it on every channel on every digital on every platform on every radio station on every podcast out there in cities like California and cities like New York it is not the exception it is the norm to see executive producers of content and if you compare their business models to the executive producers of content the UFC it's absolutely in line but somewhere people have tried to take this off script and say oh no no no no this is sport and football sport and baseball sport and we're seeing some irregularities now I'm not sure you'd even be right on that but I've never spent two seconds delving into that I'm not a huge sports guy in fairness I've just never explored that Avenue because you're not making the right comparison how do you monopolize something that a million other people do and some of them even busier some of them even bigger so then you try to minimize it down a go okay well specifically the sport of MMA the sport of MMA fully know what that means there's 50 different definitions within this country alone each state sets up their own definition it is not like any of those other sports that are in the mainstream at all whatsoever it is regulated by the government and get 50 different opinions but as far as a monopoly of a sport that 50 different entities just within this country alone regulate proclaim policy rule provide that's a stretch for me if you want to compare businesses and compare what's fair you take one executive director of content and compare them to another executive director of content and this is some of the fun that I've got to have while working on submission underground so I got to sit on a lot of phone calls with a lot of people who I would like to smarten up sometimes I just don't have the time and I don't have the energy and I really don't care about them but I do care about you all