The Invisible Hand of the UFC

In big and small ways, unregulated capitalism controls every aspect of a mixed martial artist's life. MMA presents itself as the free market of martial movements, but due to the structure of incentives and penalties (much like all free markets), even choices such as how a fighter fights—whether they kick, punch, or grapple—are influenced by the UFC.

When an athlete looks for knockouts at the risk of being knocked out, the UFC rewards them with post-fight bonuses (on and off the record) and favorable marketing. If an athlete fights "too strategically" in the opinion of the UFC, they can be cut, put on the shelf, forced to fight for less pay, forced to fight while injured, lose coverage for training-related injuries, given mismatches and last-minute fights (to lose), and placed in early prelim fights so that if they do win no one notices.

One of the early criticisms of the UFC, made famous by Senator John McCain, was that it was nothing more than "human cockfighting." When Dana White and Zuffa, LLC bought the UFC in 2001 from SEG, they implemented rules to make MMA appear more like boxing and less like a violent spectacle. Since regulators were already familiar with professional boxing, this gave the UFC an air of legitimacy. MMA was now ostensibly a sport.

The explicit rules were changed to give the impression of reducing the violence, yet in truth, this gave cover for the UFC to introduce perverse incentives that added the violence right back. Through invisible rules, the UFC took control of the fights away from the fighters. As far as autonomy, it is more akin to human cockfighting now than it has ever been.

There is no independent regulating body the UFC answers to—state commissions only enforce state regulations, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) works for the UFC, and the UFC owns its titles and rankings. Without oversight, the UFC is free to implement perverse incentive structures to create unnatural and artificial behaviors and results. The UFC uses the catchphrase "anything can happen," but in reality, the UFC can't leave fights up to chance. It puts its thumb on the scale because it can. The UFC is not a sport but sports entertainment. Imagine matchmaking in any other sport where it was completely at the whim of one owner? Is that not itself a work? Imagine watching a video game where players one and two were both played by the same person. That's the UFC.

After arriving with one fighter and leaving with another, Don King once said, "I came into the ring with the champion, and I left with the champion." The UFC has similarly left nothing to chance. Since the UFC owns the titles and all fighters are contracted with the UFC, like the WWE, the UFC always keeps its titles. Every win is a win for the UFC. The only remaining variable is how the fight is fought.

To better understand the UFC's control mechanisms, imagine basketball if the NBA itself paid out a bonus for players who had the most slam dunks in a game. Would that impact how the game was played? Of course. If you were benched for not dunking, would that affect your play? Yes. When framed through the lens of other sports, this is obvious. Yet seemingly for everyone involved in MMA, this is a massive blind spot—everyone other than the UFC.

However, you can count slam dunks. It does not require human subjectivity. But what constitutes an exciting performance? Dana White, the president/dictator of the UFC, has stated on numerous occasions that it is better to be exciting and lose than to be "boring" and win. Yet whose job is it in the UFC to decide what's exciting? Dana White.

For the UFC, controlling behavior isn't an accident but the goal. One of the purposes of a regulating body is to eliminate favoritism (or at least attempt to regulate against it) and represent multiple voices. In the UFC, favoritism is the norm. The only voice is the UFC's.

The UFC monopoly is as real as it gets—no one can tell it what to do. As a result, it has complete control, including owning most of the MMA market and influencing all other fight promotions. Other promotions don't want to cross the UFC, and their fighters fight to attract the UFC.

There is no market solution preventing monopolies, cronyism, exploitation, and domination. If you think of the UFC (or any powerful private entity) as a government, then it's an absolute authoritarian dictatorship where participants have no vote, representation, or say in how their government is run. Monopolies are private dictatorships.

Imagine if the NBA league were to create performance incentives. It would only benefit the league and not its members. But in the UFC, where athletes and teams have no say, the governing body creates the only incentives to serve itself.

Incentivizing performance is different from incentivizing winning. Individual teams and athletes only care about winning. The league cares about ratings, which means they care about "entertaining" the audience. What's supposed to make sports pure and fair is the simple premise that all that matters is victory. The UFC has conflicting interests from the MMA teams and their fighters. Since the UFC owns all the players, it doesn't care about competition. It cares about extracting the most profit from its athletes. It doesn't compete for better pay because all its athletes are UFC athletes, and none of the other promotions have the money to compete with the UFC. In other sports, unions exist to protect and bargain for the athletes since they're held captive by one major league. With the UFC, there is no union and no competition. The UFC has already won.

It's common in MMA to have managers side with promoters over their clients. Boxing addressed this with the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act. Unfortunately, the UFC has prevented this act from expanding into MMA. Perhaps it's poignant that before his death, Senator John McCain advocated for the expansion of the Ali Act to humanize "human cockfighting," and it was the UFC who said no.

For UFC fighters, there is a panic-inducing tension between being crowd-pleasing and winning. Some UFC fighters have spoken about the damage this has caused their psyche. In "A Future with No Future: Depression, the Left, and the Politics of Mental Health," Mikkel Krause Frantzen writes:

"Capitalism, in other words, inflicts a double injury on depressed people. First, it causes, or contributes to, the state of depression. Second, it erases any form of causality and individualizes the illness, so that it appears as if the depression in question is a personal problem. In some cases, it appears to be your own fault. If you had just lived a better and more active life, made other choices, had a more positive mindset, et cetera, then you would not be depressed. This is the song sung by psychologists, coaches, and therapists around the world: happiness is your choice, your responsibility. The same goes for unhappiness and depression. Capitalism makes us feel bad and then, to add insult to injury, makes us feel bad about feeling bad."

We hear about fighters suffering, but we don't assign blame to the UFC because we have been taught to see mental health problems as individual character flaws rather than as symptoms of a flawed system. The UFC wants to hear from its fighters that "somebody is going to get knocked out in this fight," which also includes the person making this statement. Imagine an American football player saying they were willing to hurt themselves to make the NFL happy. This is neither competitive nor healthy. Perhaps this is what the UFC means when they say they don't want competitors or athletes, but "fighters"—or as Joe Rogan puts it, "an animal." Like any cult, they don't want healthy people but the most vulnerable.

To reinforce the UFC post-fight bonuses, base pay is kept low. Only 10-20% of the UFC's revenue goes to fighter pay, which includes bonuses. In most other sports, it's closer to 50%, and for boxing, it could be well above that. If an NBA player were to start making a fraction of their current pay, would that slam dunk bonus push them to dunk more? Would anyone be confused as to why there were fewer jump shots?

Imagine the NFL implementing a longest pass bonus. What would happen to the running game? Would Hail Mary passes become the norm just as Hail Mary haymakers are in the UFC? If UFC-style incentives were applied to other sports, would it be harder for coaches to get their players to follow game plans? Would these incentives directly contradict the coach's job? Would it change long-term coaching strategy? If coaches were incentivized with a win bonus (in the UFC, they get a percentage of the bonus), would they risk permanent injury to players to win one game? Even for inconsequential games? Would an MMA coach throw in the towel to save their fighter if they knew their bonus was on the line? The Pete Rose scandal is business as usual in the UFC (in more ways than one).

If the coach got a split of all the player bonuses, would they modify their strategy around bonuses? Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches often have fighters that only strike. Wrestlers abandon wrestling for striking. In this unnatural environment, would the best strategies for winning rise to the top? The problem with financial incentives isn't that they don't work but work too well. "Free" markets are unnatural markets.

Limited rules create an illusion of an open and free environment, but there are hidden constraints. It's the invisible hand of capitalism; rather than create opportunities, it closes off possibilities until you are left with only a few options. No one told Amazon employees to pee in bottles; they were always free to pee in their pants. Reporters don't wonder why Amazon employees do this—it's this or dying unhoused. Freedom under duress is not freedom.

Material conditions create behaviors. If throwing caution to the wind means making a living, fighters will do that. If fighting injured is the only way the UFC will pay for your surgery, fighters will do that. If gambling on fights, including your own, is the only way to subsidize your below-poverty-line pay, fighters will do that. If performance-enhancing drugs can help you recover and enhance performance, fighters will do it.

Fighters will ask, sometimes plead, for a bonus. They'll even tell us how poor they are. Think about that, a professional athlete on live television that's being broadcast worldwide in one of the world's most popular "sports" having to beg for money. Do we appreciate how unusual this is?

An informal bonus is to get on UFC commentator Joe Rogan's podcast, which fighters sometimes opt for instead of asking for a bonus. That means getting on a pay-per-view card and being placed high enough on the card for Rogan to interview you if you win. Of course, having a media personality as powerful as Joe Rogan commentating for the UFC is itself a conflict. Is this unbiased? Is it still commentary? Is it still interviews? Or are they something else? Does the UFC have zero influence over which UFC fighters get to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience? There's no way to know. But every UFC fighter is thinking about Rogan's influence on their career. Rather than fighting for pay, the UFC has sublimated fighters to monetize the attention economy. PowerfulJRE™ is both a carrot and a stick. Following the UFC program and fighting like an "animal" means getting on Rogan's good side. Getting on Rogan's bad side means getting buried by one of the most powerful voices in media. But if you got paid a lot, would any of this matter as much?

The UFC wants hunger games. They want starving fighters tearing each other apart for the last morsel of food. Low pay and elimination of competition pave the way for manipulation.

Then there's headlining a UFC pay-per-view, which means getting a percentage of the buys. For most if not all MMA fighters, this is the only way to make over a million dollars. How do you get on a PPV? How do you headline a PPV? How do you headline a UFC event? How do you get favorable placement on a card? How do you get a favorable match-up?

In advertising, there is something known as a "Q score." It's a way to quantify how valuable a celebrity is to a brand. The UFC has an invisible system that works like the Q score, yet it is not based on market research. Instead, the UFC relies on the feel of the boss, a system pioneered by the WWE's Vince McMahon. The boss, whether White or McMahon, likes stereotypes and characters. Rather than listening to the audience, it's a sorting mechanism that finds fans who like the same thing the boss does. The UFC's ads and partnerships all mirror White's bigotry and toxic masculinity. This fan echo chamber naturally idolizes the boss because they see themselves in the boss. As a result, fans become fanatics who think what the boss tells them to think and want what the boss tells them to want. Now with gambling, if the UFC can get you addicted, you'll never leave.

How does a fighter get on White and Rogan's radar? By increasing their invisible Q score. Record and rankings are secondary to a fighter's UFC Q score. Rankings themselves are also subjective because that too is owned by the UFC rather than by an independent body. Again, imagine a single team owner owning the standings.

If the powers that be don't like you, it might be a while before you get a title shot. Khabib Nurmagomedov is valued by the UFC now, but it took him 25 straight wins (nine in the UFC) to get a title shot. Though Nurmagomedov was dominant and the consensus best lightweight in MMA, he had a wrestling-heavy style and limited English. Part of his stock rising with Dana White was improving his English and talking trash during his fights. Then he got into a war of words with Conor McGregor that culminated in McGregor and team attacking Nurmagomedov inside of a bus—which improved both of their Q scores. Then beating McGregor and jumping out of the Octagon to attack McGregor's team catapulted Nurmagomedov's Q score into the stratosphere. Example after example, there are things more important to the UFC than winning, many of which delegitimize the sport.

McGregor, on the other hand, got his first title shot in five fights. Racking up four UFC Q score-friendly bonuses along the way. After winning the featherweight title, McGregor was 1-1 against Nate Diaz, yet still challenged for the lightweight title in his first fight at that weight. McGregor is now 1-3 in his last four fights and 3-4 in his last seven, yet he is still the highest-paid UFC fighter. The UFC is an arbitrary system that prioritizes profit and spectacle over fairness, purity, or fighter autonomy and safety.

MMA has multiple paths to victory, yet the only finish seen in UFC highlights and rewarded with bonuses are knockouts. The UFC has kept fighters with losing records while cutting winning fighters. Sports attempt objectivity, whereas the UFC makes no attempt. In its own words, it is a "fight business," just as the WWE calls itself a "business."

Former UFC champion Tyron Woodley has often wondered out loud why UFC fighters can't get the same treatment as athletes in other sports, but like most other fighters, he can't point out the glaringly obvious: NBA, NFL, NHL, MLB, MLS, all have unions. During the height of the 1980s professional wrestling craze, NFL legend Gene Upshaw told Jesse Ventura during a chance meeting, "You boys need to unionize." The WWE squashed Ventura's union hopes before they even started. The UFC is playing out of the WWE's playbook.

The UFC itself drafted an 80-page analysis for fighters that explains why it makes more sense to keep the fight standing. Mixed martial arts has become boxing with small gloves, with some other martial arts mixed in. And that's what the UFC wants. Their system of control works; otherwise, they wouldn't use it.

If the UFC were about discovering the best paths to victory, it would stay neutral. That was once the point of the UFC, removing outside interference to find out what works best in a fight. But that is no longer what the UFC is and no longer what the UFC wants.

Even something as sacred as a fighter's fighting stance is influenced by financial incentives. Despite striking becoming the dominant UFC style, most UFC fighters come from wrestling and grappling. This makes sense because the UFC is more lucrative than a wrestling (or grappling) career. It would make little sense to transition from a high-paying sport like football, basketball, baseball, or even high-level boxing to MMA. On the contrary, more and more MMA fighters are requesting to go to boxing for the bigger paychecks.

In wrestling, along with other grappling arts, if you are right-handed, you stand with your right leg forward. In boxing and kickboxing, this makes you a southpaw. Standing with your dominant side in the lead makes sense if you are trying to grab your opponent (for a righty, your right hand is now closest to your opponent). On the one hand, standing southpaw means right-handed wrestlers are putting their most powerful limbs in the lead and power striking from their "weak" side. On the other hand, wrestlers are more used to wrestling and defending from this position.

However, southpaws do disproportionately well in all sports. Only 10% of the general population is left-handed, but it's closer to 20% in MMA. As far as winning is concerned, being a southpaw is an advantage. Then why do wrestlers who are used to standing southpaw switch to orthodox when that undermines their chances at victory? Because you're paid to punch, not wrestle. They want their dominant hand in the rear so they can punch as hard as they can. In economics, this is known as performance chasing—chasing performance at the risk of failure. In the UFC, what's more important: winning or knockouts? Knockouts. You get performance bonuses, not bonuses for best win records. For these reasons, spamming right hands is a hallmark of UFC striking.

Beyond just their success, there might be a stylistic reason for the over-representation of left-handers. When a southpaw fights an orthodox fighter, there's a likelihood of collisions—a head clashing with a fist or foot, but also another head. Clashing of the heads means blood. The UFC says it doesn't like that, but it likes that. Same with eye pokes. It wants that violence not only for the aesthetics but also for the increased likelihood of stoppages.

Southpaw vs. orthodox also increases leg injuries. Not only do heads clash, but so do shins. This becomes a sorting mechanism for more violent fights and more violent fighters. Whether a southpaw wins or loses, if they're in more blood baths, the UFC will keep them.

As corrupt as boxing is, it doesn't have the same incentives and penalties as the UFC. At the height of his power in boxing, Don King took a smaller cut from fighters than the UFC. Boxing also has regulating bodies and the Muhammad Ali Boxing Reform Act. In fact, it's the boxing commissions that have to regulate the UFC. Boxing, of course, has the problem of bribery. The UFC's corruption, however, is more efficient. It doesn't need to bribe anyone because it holds all the seats in power. It's no longer corruption if it's a feature of the system. Much like the US monopoly over the world, nothing it does is a crime when no one can try it. People don't appreciate how powerful monopoly is. Perhaps it is so powerful that it is beyond comprehension.

In boxing, there are more body shots, more defense, and less spamming of right hands. Bring the UFC's perverse incentive model to boxing (which the UFC tried), and much of the technical aspects will vanish, along with corners throwing in the towel to save their fighters.

UFC fighters train in all the technical aspects of combat, hiring specific coaches for each combative art. Then they throw a lot of it away to fight as their incentives demand. Unfortunately, the UFC's fighting style has a high physical cost. In the UFC's short existence, there's already a long trail of broken bodies.

Incentives drive behavior. You ultimately don't need any other fight analysis than: they fight like this because that's how they're paid to fight.

"Excitement" was never about what the fans wanted; it was always about what Dana White wanted. If fans wanted boxing, they would have stayed with boxing. People turned to mixed martial arts to see the mixing of martial arts and the originality of the mixed martial artist. What we have instead is a profit model with fighters attached to it. The UFC is not a sport, it's a "fight business." It doesn't want competitors or competition, it wants "fighters" cockfighting.

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