Is the UFC too Tough on Its Sponsors?

The UFC and MMA are gaining new fans and commercial acceptance every day, and its taking its sponsors along for the ride.

And in what should be a unanimous decision, the UFC is the world's most popular promotion, carrying the majority of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world on its roster, and also the bulk of the best challengers for those who rule their weight classes. Without a doubt, the Tapout crew is widely recognized as the first company to experience worldwide popularity and a boom in sales as a result of hooking up with the UFC.

The company went from making $30,000 and selling t-shirts at small shows, to hooking up with the UFC and making millions of dollars per year. Other companies, that are not direct sponsors of the UFC, have still found similar success in MMA. These include Affliction, Clinch Gear, Bad Boy, Cage Fighter, RVCA, Rock Revival Jeans , Silver Star, and Warrior, just to name a few.

However, numerous incidents in the past, and one recent incident between the UFC and Tapout, begs the question: How much do these sponsors owe the UFC as a result of their success in being associated with the sport and the organization? And should fight fans start to pay a little more attention to the way the UFC runs its business? After all, it is the right of the UFC to run its organization the way it wants to run it.

Tapout is an interesting case study playing out right before our eyes, as the company was working on a special walkout shirt for Fedor Emelienenko to wear en route to what was supposed to be a drubbing of Fabricio Werdum. That was before the UFC put the clamps down and threatened to bar Tapout apparel from the UFC if Fedor actually wore the shirt, which is similar to the way the UFC handled Affliction when it attempted to branch out into the promotion business, and we all know how that ended up. As a side note, the UFC also squeezed RVCA, the primary sponsor of BJ Penn, out of sponsoring Fedor . Clinch Gear, which is owned in part by Dan Henderson and has already been exiled from the UFC, picked up the deal and manufactured the official Fedor walkout shirt .

But Tapout has been in bed with the UFC for a long time, and most, presumably even Tapout, had assumed it was a different animal, immune to threats from the UFC. Evidently, this is not the case.

The NFL doesn't throw players out on the street who choose to wear a brand of shoes that differs from the company licensed to make the official jerseys, and neither does the NBA, two brands the UFC could stand to learn a lot from.

I would hope that the UFC would open its mind and see that by limiting the sponsors that can be involved with their brand, they are limiting the amount of money that smaller-name fighters can make, because these companies only have so much money to throw around, which, if you look at the pittance some of these fighters get paid, you would think the UFC would understand.

It's no wonder some of the top talent in the MMA world is playing hard-to-get with the UFC.