Francis is the ‘B’ side. Fury’s calling the shots if he wants the fight.

The UFC currently holds onto 83% of revenue. Had the revenue been shared in line with other professional sports (50%), UFC fighters would have made $330,000,000 more in 2022 alone, 3 times what they actually made.

Fighters desperately need a union.

Dude hasn't KO'd anyone in over 4 years, has 1 KO in coming on 10 years now + he's moving up a weight class.

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He has a couple losses to usada and god though...

Maybe.. I’d guess otherwise.. definitely not the minimum.. American sports always rewards bad behavior

That’s all he needs for a contender to be interested..my point can be made by Kimbrels to the cubs and now non existence! He was great for red Sox for a few years held out signed by cubs and flopped

I assure you...nobody is picking him up for the 2023 season for anything more than the league minimum before Opening Day.

And you act like he's consistently been an elite pitcher his entire career. Bauer has pitched more awful seasons than he has great seasons. He pitched elite in 2018, 2020, and half of 2021, so effectively two seasons since 2020 and his half of 2021 comprise one season. His other 7 seasons have been complete ass.

Lol, you act like he forgot how to pitch.. he’ll be signed guaranteed, no one cares what he did/didn’t do only that his arm works and that can Be seen at a HS field with a mound anywhere on earth

He won't sign to any new contract before Opening Day because he's still under his current contract. The Dodgers are on the hook for all but the league minimum. Nobody's going to "extend" him until they see how he pitches after the layoff.

My thought experiment for “how player friendly is a league’s salary structure?” is basically trying to imagine what would happen if owners were banned from violating otherwise applicable labor laws (an example of such a violation would be dictating to employees who they have to work for through a draft). So I’m not sure I’d agree that the distribution of league capital is really separable from overall compensation, but I’m also not sure if you’re really arguing it’s a separate issue or not.

It seems to me that, as you observe, some owners have a willingness to spend money to win games that goes past the cap. It also seems somewhat obvious to me that, in addition to proving the salary cap is porous, such free spending owners prove that there is large unmet demand from owners for “winning.” Surely if Joe Lacob is willing to pay salary plus luxury tax, he would be willing to pay the same total amount in pure salary. Therefore I assume that (at least current period) NBA comp would rise without a cap.

The long term problem is related to the one you highlight in that, under my thought experiment, the league probably becomes even more top heavy than it is already especially with respect to major metro areas. It also become vulnerable to boom/bust overspend cycles. This may be bad for the league overall long term and bad for future players.

I’m also not 100% sure whether the luxury tax gets spent on salaries or not by teams below the cap. Like it doesn’t seem like it does necessarily but I couldn’t figure it out googling while watching wildcard games. Cheers!

He was looking right where he was shooting, lol

What did he do ? Hit his wife ? That too publicly ? Oh never mind wrong guy.

Wholeheartedly disagree. Jones vs Ngannou had the potential to be the biggest fight ever. UFC fumbled the bag over pride.

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NBA isn’t nearly at volume for those models to apply, and I think the current issue (if there is one from the player perspective, aside from the brutal schedule and wildly varying officiating quality they don’t have a ton of complaints) isn’t with the structure of contracts or the overall wealth distribution amongst them (we’re seeing $140 million contracts given to year 2, year 3 players already…and not high draft guys) it’s the distillation of league capital amongst markets.

There will never, ever, be a population that can support an Oklahoma City franchise the same way a population can support a New York franchise…and it’s bad. My team is worth $7.5 Billion - putting them in second behind the Dallas Cowboys in team valuation amongst all North American sports - and a team like the Pelicans are worth about $1.6 Billion; that essentially means the Pelicans are physically incapable of earning as much as the Warriors in a business capacity, which means ownership groups will never have the ability to spend on salary. The salary cap in the NBA is soft, it effectively does not exist when someone like Joe Lacob takes a several hundred million dollar hit in luxury taxes every year with a smile and a trophy in his hands. So right now it’s not the inability of players to get well paying contacts, it’s the lack of earning potential in individual markets and a massive disparity between the ones at the top and the rest of the league in terms of spending potential whilst still turning a profit. The owners have painted themselves into a corner.

Don’t worry Dana is investigating that

This was a forgone conclusion. This was coming down the road for two years. Both sides were very vocal multiple times about potential contract discussions.

Shame because I think neither side is even considering each other's vantage point.

haven’t you followed the updates about pfl? You’ll see him rather sooner than later. I dislike jake paul but it might be a good development for the fighters

They didn’t strip it and act as if he was never champ. It’s not removed from the records. He’s still former HW champion and will be forever. Just not reigning champ.

I think he quietly retired without announcing anything.

The idea is to do it with mma gloves so Francis has a chance; that'd be interesting.

Not sure the players would agree the NBA collective bargaining agreement is that player friendly. I strongly suspect the union doesn’t like individual player max and overall salary caps.

Basketball is somewhat unlike many other professional sports in that talent is relatively obvious at the time the player is signing their rookie deal. My suspicion is a baseball or fifa football style league structure (mostly without hard player or team salary caps) for the NBA would get NBA players in aggregate payed more, with high potential rookies and all stars in particular doing better enough a probable reduction in comp for the veteran role players wouldn’t swamp it.

Makes sense, over 12.5 million bought PPVs to watch McGregor lose five out of nine fights. Two of those were in 2021 with no crowd but still had over 1.5 million PPV buys each.

UFC 260 and 270 with Ngannou as the main event maybe broke over 500K buys together.