At a star-studded media conference call yesterday, a new Mixed Martial Arts Athletes Association was unveiled by former Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney, flanked by a number of UFC stars, including Georges St-Pierre, Cain Velasquez, TJ Dillashaw, Donald Cerrone and Tim Kennedy.
Those five fighters will serve as the five-man board for the MMAA, while Rebney will participate in an advisory role.
It had been anticipated that they would be announcing a new fighters union, but Rebney clarified that due to the fact it would take years of battling legal red-tape to form such an organization, the MMAA will instead be an association, which will give fighters power to stand up to the UFC, even though it won’t be a legal union as far as the National Labor Relations Board is concerned.
Focusing solely on the UFC, Rebney outlined three main goals that the MMAA will be looking to achieve:
1. Collect a “substantial” settlement to compensate past and present UFC fighters.
2. Increase fighter revenue sharing from eight percent to 50 percent.
3. Negotiate a collective bargaining agreement similar to what athletes in other major sports receive.
“Every time we go fight, we’re afraid,” GSP stated during the call. “This is a different kind of fight. Even though I know a lot of fighters are afraid, because of my situation I’m in a much better place than I was a few years ago. I know fighters are afraid, but it’s time to step up and do the right thing,” St. Pierre said. “It’s like a fight in the Octagon, but it’s a fight against what is right and what is wrong. We should never be afraid to stand for what is right.”
Tim Kennedy also went into detail as to why he felt that a fighters association is neccessary in the UFC.
“We’re the ones that pack the stadiums. We’re the ones that drive the incredible pay-per-view buy rates,” Kennedy said. “The guys that are seated right now around me, the ones that have bled in the Octagon, taken last-minute fights, a day before event changes, guys like myself trying to fight for a different opponent, that we’re responsible for the millions of dollars of sponsorships worldwide that we would have been given a fair share.
“You would have seen an iron-clad protection put in place that when things got bad [fighters] would be protected. When we get hurt, when we retire, when we’re damaged that there would be something there, a safety net and it’s not there.”
Responding to the media call, the UFC told MMAfighting.com, “We respect all of our athletes and are always open and willing to hear their thoughts on how to improve the sport.”
There’s no doubt that the fighters involved are all doing so with the best of intentions, though some doubts have been cast about Bjorn Rebney’s involvement in the association.
“I think everybody has a question about what Bjorn’s motives are and what exactly is going on there and I think that’ll come out in time,” UFC legend Randy Couture said when asked his opinion on the MMAA announcement. “His reputation as a promoter precedes him a little bit and so it’s interesting now that all the sudden he’s for fighter rights and all these things that obviously as the CEO of a major fight organization he didn’t demonstrate that same feeling.”
The other elephant in the room is the fact that a number of the fighters involved on the board are represented by the CAA talent agency, a direct competitor to new UFC owners WME-IMG, so there are undercurrents here that will make some observers uneasy about who is really pulling the strings here.
Listen to the full two-hour long MMAA media call media call below courtesy of MMAWeekly.
