Former Presidential candidate Andrew Yang is known as one of the more outspoken political figures in the world today.
The UFC has had their practices criticized before and Yang is jumping onto that onslaught, saying that the promotion exploits their fighters.
“I think fighters have been exploited for years and years and that exploitation becomes more apparent in this environment when the fighters aren’t able to compete and their entire livelihood has dried up,” Yang told Bloody Elbow.
Yang had previously expressed interest in passing the Ali Act through Congress, which is an act that the UFC has been speaking out against for a long time now.
Another thing the Yang believes is that the UFC systematically squashes their fighters in order to not treat them like top athletes get treated in other professional sports.
“I’m a numbers guy,” Yang said. “In every other sport, athletes are receiving anywhere between 47-50% of the sport’s revenue. In the UFC, the estimates are that fighters are receiving anywhere between the 10-15% range. And that’s not surprising when you look at the payouts for fighters, or even if you look at a major PPV card — those fighters are getting paid 25, 30, or 35,000 to fight, and these are fighters who are at the top of the industry. Meanwhile, these fighters generally only fight a couple of times a year and have to pay coaches and many of the expenses. You have a major sport with billions of dollars of value, where the athletes often can’t afford to fight full-time, and it is only because the UFC systematically squashed any effort for fighters to be treated the same way athletes are in other sports.”
There has been no response yet from the UFC as to the accusations made against them by the former presidential candidate.
