Jose Aldo missed out on a life-changing sum of money when he pulled out of his fight with Conor McGregor at UFC 189 this weekend due to a broken rib, UFC President Dana White has revealed.
“Yeah, he probably would’ve made close to four million [dollars]” White stated on The Rusillo Show yesterday.
Aldo’s basic salary is currently $250,000 and as a long-time champion he’s also entitled to a cut of the pay-per-revenue for his fights above a certain unspecified level, but up until now the featherweight kingpin hasn’t been a big draw by himself and also hasn’t fought anybody else that’s moved the needle enough for that payment to really kick in (his highest PPV buy rate so far was just 330,000 for his fight with Frankie Edgar at UFC 156).
McGregor was going to be the fighter who was set to change all that, finally giving the featherweight division the superstar presence it needed to deliver big ratings, with White anticipating over a million pay-per-view buys.
That would have led to a payout for Aldo that would have given him the kind of financial security he’d waited his whole life for, so it must have been a gut-wrenching decision to have to turn his back on that.
McGregor has claimed that Aldo is just running scared, but x-ray scans have proven that the champion did indeed fracture his rib, and White has also now stated that he’s seen footage of the training room kick that did the damage.
“It’s crazy because I actually saw the video,” white says. “He gets hit with a spinning-heel kick, which is crazy in itself that anyone is even throwing that at him two weeks before his fight. It is what it is. He stood to make a lot of money, a lot of money. If he could’ve fought, he would’ve fought.”
No matter what happens on Saturday night between Conor McGregor and Chad Mendes, Aldo still remains the featherweight champion and will go on to fight the winner, but if ‘The Notorious’ loses then the Brazilian may never get another chance to earn this amount of money in his career.
