[Krazikarl]

I'm not convicned that he saw a final version of his contract, and I think that he is wrong in some of his objections. I generally dont accept the word of bloggers when it comes to fine details of contracts and am a bit suspicious about much of this. Its especially telling that many managers of fighters, who would be better able to interpret such contracts, disagree with his assessment of things.

The point of the deal is that Zuffa takes over all marketing of many aspects of the fighters self promotion (ie they make stuff like toys and t-shirts of the fighter and sell them). In return for that, the fighter gets a cut.

Zuffa isnt allowing them to have their cake and eat it too. If you sign up for Zuffa to sell your shit, and you get your cut of Zuffa's money, then you cant shop around your image to other organizations. So in exchange to getting lots of merchandising money from Zuffa, you cant empower their competitors. Sounds fair to me and I really dont see the big deal here. If you dont like this deal as a fighter - dont sign the contract. Just dont pull a Randy where you sign the contract and then bitch about it.

The only major issue is the length of this type of contract. Clearly permanently signing a fighter to this would not be fair. But I dont think that they have it right about the perpetuality clause. And clearly a fighter would be stupid to sign a contract like this that exists forever. I think it just means that Zuffa can use the image of the fighter (provided they pay the royalties) for as long as they want, but I dont know about the part where the fighter can never get out of the deal if they want.

I interpret as this - once you fight in the UFC, the UFC is allowed to use that footage for however long they want, even after you leave. Its similar with this stuff. But that doesnt mean that you can never leave the UFC.

A lot of the other objections are silly. Yeah, fighters can't use Zuffa or the UFC brandnames or trademarks for personal gain. They couldnt do that already. Its like in the NFL - Peyton Manning cant use the NFL logo or even the Colts logo in whatever the hell he wants (which is why you see so many weird commercials with athlets not in their team uniforms but in some ripoff). This is a standard clause and not worthy of an objection.

Things like audit rights are small details, but important to the fighters, so yeah, their managers should negotiate for that right. I agree that its important to have the right to check up that the UFC is keeping up its end of the bargain, and managers should make sure they get that right for their fighters.

I think that this is likely not a finalized form of the contract. There are clearly things that need to be worked out by managers (like the auditing stuff). But since we have no indication that any fighters have signed this exact deal that the author supposedly got yet, I dont see it as time to get excited about it.