Header: Jeff Bottari | Credit: Zuffa LLC via Getty Images, edited
The bell rings and Michael Page rushes at Evangelista Santos inside the caged ring. Before a crowd of 12,000 in London, he goes for a barrage of left and right hammer blows but Santos knows how to take a punch.
Page is relentless, working Santos over with a kick left, a kick right — and Santos has no response. He’s up against the cage with nowhere to go. Page smells blood. Literally.
But when he leaps up to connect with another right hand, Santos snatches him out of thin air and cranks Page’s neck down to the mat, which is already blood-specked from the brutality of the previous fights.
Page peppers his opponent with kicks, leaving Santos in a daze, especially after a gruesome liver shot that buckles his knees and leaves a lash mark on his abdomen.
Suddenly, Page is in the air where he connects with a match-winning knee to Santos’ head.
But as fans jump out of their seats, the fighters’ loved ones could be forgiven for more basic concerns, like whether Santos has good health insurance. He would need it, given the severity of his injuries.
In that fight in 2016, Page’s knee dented Santos’ forehead, fractured his skull and nearly killed him.
The brutality of mixed martial arts with its strikes, throws and chokes is raising an unexpected question of solidarity in a bloody sport where every fight can be the last.
Do these modern gladiators need to unionize?
It would, said 34-year-old amateur MMA fighter Danny Uribe, “be a game changer.”
MMA fighters are classified as independent contractors, not employees. That means that they cannot negotiate health insurance, disability, a pension or other benefits with the company that nets the lion’s share of profits when they put their bodies on the line.
Santos underwent a seven-hour surgery and had to turn to a GoFundMe campaign to cover the $20,000 cost. He never returned to the ring.
Forming a union could help MMA fighters obtain life-changing medical and financial protections, which is partly why a 2020 survey conducted by sports website The Athletic showed that four in every five fighters support unionization.
“The time is right,” said Lucas Middlebrook, a labor attorney who has been pushing for this in MMA since 2015.
There are questions about whether the sport’s most famous faces would buy into unionization, and whether they matter.
"The fighters who are most prominent have the least to gain [by] unionizing," said Michael Conklin, an assistant professor of business law at Angelo State University in Texas. "Like Conor McGregor now, he can already make demands and the UFC has to give in because he's Conor McGregor. If you're some low-level guy [...] you can't make demands."
The working-class fighters in the sport are the ones likely to need the power of collective bargaining that would come through organizing, but even the big stars will benefit from a stronger industry ecosystem. Put another way: healthier opponents, more career longevity and more matches between better-known fighters.
Only four of MMA’s marquee names can command million-dollar paydays. Most fighters compete for as little as $12,000 per fight — and the typical professional MMA career only lasts about three years.
UFC president Dana White says the company is worth around $10 billion. It brought in around $900 million last year but its nearly 730 fighters earned less than 20% of that — with just a few fighters receiving most of that money.
By comparison, NBA players are in a labor union and receive closer to 50% of their league’s yearly revenue, with guaranteed minimums for all players, team salary caps and maximum contracts for the players deemed most valuable.
In MMA, low- or mid-level fighters “would be looking at a tripling of their salary” with a union, according to Erik Magraken, a lawyer who specializes in combat sports.
Uribe, known by his ring name Shinigami the Reaper, sympathizes with the plight of his professional colleagues. A knee injury in 2014 sidelined him for three months while he was unemployed.
"It didn't help looking for work when I couldn't even walk,” Uribe said.
More recently, Uribe’s car and fighting gear were stolen, leaving him to launch a GoFundMe campaign to replace them because, he says, MMA does not cover the $4,000 needed for replacements.
Such uncertainty is why Middlebrook wants change.
Middlebrook first started advocating for unionization in MMA through his work with former UFC bantamweight Leslie Smith. A middling fighter with 12 wins and nine losses over the course of her career, Smith’s most significant battle was outside the ring, and Middlebrook was in her corner.
Smith sought for years to unionize MMA, first through the Professional Fighters Association, which failed. Then she started Project Spearhead, her own "democratic, fighter-led organization" aiming to unionize all MMA fighters.
Project Spearhead had been actively collecting union authorization cards from fighters but it disintegrated shortly after the UFC bought out Smith’s contract.
That happened just months after Project Spearhead’s launch. Smith believed that her pro-union stance — not her win-loss record in the octagon — led to her release, and she filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). It was dismissed in September 2018 for insufficient proof.
A union would’ve been formed if 30% of fighters under contract signed a card — showing their intent to support a union — and if a majority of fighters voted in favor of organizing.
The NLRB, which is an independent federal enforcer of labor law related to collective bargaining, has recently undergone an ideological shift. Biden appointee Jennifer Abruzzo replaced Peter Robb, described as a “career anti-union management lawyer” by socialist magazine the Jacobin, as the NLRB’s new general counsel.
Abruzzo will take another look at whether independent contractors, such as MMA fighters, are misclassified as employees. If so, that could have seismic ramifications for the sport and perhaps lead to a new unionization push.
Unionization is unlikely to happen soon.
Most fighters don’t tend to come from unionized industries and don’t understand the process, Middlebrook noted, although getting in the ring is not some fighters’ only job. Geoff Neal, a top 15 welterweight in the UFC, worked as a Texas Roadhouse server in Dallas during the pandemic because no fights meant no money.
But the biggest obstacle of all is likely the UFC.
“Money and control — the same reasons every business doesn’t want their employees to unionize,” Conklin said.
In 2019, the company’s chief operating officer Lawrence Epstein argued to The Ringer that fighters could not legally unionize because the UFC deems them to be independent contractors.
Outside of organizing, fighters could wrestle some money and control back through other measures like expanding the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act.
The Ali Reform Act, enacted in 2000 to protect the rights and welfare of fighters in the similarly dangerous world of boxing, would move the entire sport of MMA — not just the UFC — toward a boxing-esque model with title unification fights across different companies. Perhaps not coincidentally, the UFC lobbied against the bill in 2008 and 2016.
Another option for more equity in MMA, Magraken says, is legislative reform to limit long-term contracts. That would establish a more regular free-agency period for the sport’s biggest names, which could give them the leverage to negotiate with other companies for more money and consequently rattle the UFC’s monopoly.
However, the stage appears best set for a renewed unionization push that could lead to improved labor conditions and more secure protections for fighters.
Middlebrook is sure of this.
If MMA fighters tried to organize the same way Smith did but under this NLRB, he says, they would actually be considered employees entitled to unionize.