A Decade of Litigation, One Uncomfortable Revenue Figure
The lawsuit that became Le v. Zuffa was filed in 2014 by Cung Le and a group of current and former UFC fighters who alleged that Zuffa, LLC — the company that owned the UFC — had used exclusionary contracts and a pattern of acquisition to suppress fighter wages across the entire MMA market. The core antitrust claim was straightforward: by buying out or eliminating every viable competing promotion, Zuffa had cornered the market for top-tier MMA fighters, which let it pay wages that a competitive market would not have permitted. The plaintiffs pointed to clauses — exclusive dealing provisions, bout covenants, and broadly worded ancillary rights grants — that, taken together, made it functionally impossible for a fighter under UFC contract to leverage a competing offer.
The case was filed in Nevada federal court and spent years in discovery. What came out during that process was more damaging to the UFC's public posture than any single court ruling. Internal documents, entered into the record and later discussed in press coverage of the filings, showed the UFC's fighter-pay share hovering well below the revenue-share percentages that had become standard in the major North American leagues. The specific figures, calculated from disclosed financial data, showed fighters receiving somewhere in the range of 16 to 20 percent of total revenue in the years examined — a number that sat alongside the NBA's roughly 50 percent player share and the NFL's roughly 48 percent as a stark illustration of what collective bargaining can produce for athletes.
The plaintiffs sought class certification, which the district court initially denied. The district court ultimately certified the class in 2023, which was the moment the litigation's economics shifted. With a certified class, Zuffa — by then operating under TKO Group Holdings after the Endeavor-WWE merger that closed in September 2023 — faced the prospect of a jury trial with the full plaintiff class. A settlement followed. In June 2024, the parties announced a $375 million agreement to resolve the case.
What $375 Million Does and Does Not Buy
Three hundred and seventy-five million dollars is a real number. It is also, in context, a carefully bounded one. TKO's market capitalization at the time of settlement was measured in billions. The UFC alone had been valued at roughly $12 billion when the Endeavor-WWE combination was structured. Against those figures, the settlement represented a meaningful legal cost but not a structural correction. It did not require the UFC to alter its contract terms, raise its revenue-share percentage, recognize a fighters' association, or submit to independent arbitration on pay disputes. The settlement was, in the language of every such agreement, made without admission of liability.
The distribution mechanics matter too. Legal fees in a decade-long antitrust class action are substantial, and class members who fought under UFC contracts during the covered period — roughly 2010 to 2017 — would receive shares calculated by a claims administrator, weighted by the number of bouts they fought and the disclosed purses they earned. Fighters who competed in fewer bouts, or who fought early in their careers when disclosed purses were lower, would receive smaller allocations. The people who stood to collect the most were not necessarily the fighters who had the worst contracts; they were the fighters who had the most fights during the covered window. That is a structural artifact of how class damages are typically distributed, and it has no relationship to remedying the pay suppression the lawsuit alleged.
The commission purse disclosure system that fed the plaintiffs' damages calculations is itself incomplete. Purse sheets published by the Nevada State Athletic Commission, the California State Athletic Commission, and the New York State Athletic Commission list contracted base purses. They do not capture pay-per-view points, discretionary performance bonuses, or the various ancillary payments that can constitute the majority of a top fighter's earnings. For fighters lower on the card, those omissions are smaller — the base purse is closer to the total — which means the commissioned-purse data used in damages calculations may actually understate how little lower-tier fighters earned in percentage terms, while overstating the gap for headliners whose real earnings include PPV backend.
The Structure That Survived
The more consequential question — the one the settlement deferred — is whether anything about how fighters are contracted, compensated, or represented actually changed. The answer, through the closing months of 2024 and into 2025, is that it did not. TKO continued to use substantially similar exclusive-dealing and ancillary-rights provisions in its standard fighter agreements. There is no UFC fighters' union. There is no collective bargaining agreement. The revenue-share gap documented in the litigation remains, because the settlement imposed no obligation to close it.
What the UFC did instead was continue the corporate trajectory that the litigation ran alongside. Endeavor took the UFC public as part of the TKO structure. Nick Khan, who had driven the WWE side of the merger, and the Endeavor leadership above the UFC operated TKO as a content and intellectual property business, not primarily a sports promoter in the traditional sense. In that framing, fighter pay is a cost of goods, not a shared revenue stream — a distinction that is invisible in a press release and visible in a balance sheet. The antitrust claim that Zuffa had monopsonized the market for elite MMA fighters — a monopsony being a single dominant buyer rather than seller — was never adjudicated on its merits. The settlement bought the UFC a clean exit from that argument.
The parallel story in the broader market is that no viable competitor emerged during the decade of litigation to discipline the UFC's pay structure from the outside. Bellator operated, then was acquired by the Professional Fighters League. ONE Championship, under Chatri Sityodtong out of Singapore, operates a different pay model and a different weight system but draws from a partially distinct fighter pool. Neither represents the kind of credible outside option that would force the UFC to raise its revenue share to retain talent. The monopsony allegation, in other words, did not become less structurally accurate because of the settlement — it simply became more expensive to have once made.
The $375 million went to lawyers and to fighters who competed under contracts the UFC still uses in substantially similar form. That is what a settlement without structural relief looks like. The revenue-share number the filings revealed is still the number. It was already known. Now it has a dollar figure attached to it, and the UFC has a receipt that says the matter is closed.