The Numbers, Side by Side
The NFL's deal, ratified in 2020, directs roughly 48 percent of total revenues to players, a figure the league and the NFLPA have both cited in public filings. Major League Baseball operates without a hard cap, but independent estimates of player-to-revenue ratios have long sat above 40 percent.
UFC fighters receive no guaranteed percentage. The figure most frequently cited in the antitrust litigation brought by Cung Le and other plaintiffs — and later examined in academic work attached to that case — placed the UFC's athlete revenue share in the range of 16 to 20 percent of revenue. The UFC has disputed the methodology behind those estimates and has never published an official share figure. What it has published, via mandatory athletic commission purse disclosures in Nevada, California, and New York, are contracted purse amounts that exclude performance bonuses, PPV revenue participation, and other undisclosed payments. Those disclosures are not a full picture of fighter compensation, but they are the only public record that exists.
Why the Gap Is Structural, Not Incidental
The distance between 49 percent and roughly 18 percent is not primarily the result of one company paying badly. It is the result of the legal architecture on each side of the comparison.
NBA and NFL players are organized. Their unions — the NBPA and NFLPA respectively — are certified collective bargaining agents with the right to negotiate a labor agreement under the National Labor Relations Act. The CBA sets a floor on revenue share, defines how that share is distributed across a minimum salary schedule, establishes grievance procedures, and creates the conditions under which players can test free agency. The revenue split is, in the end, a number that came out of a negotiation between two parties with roughly comparable access to financial records and legal resources.
UFC fighters are not unionized and are classified as independent contractors, not employees. That classification matters because it removes the UFC's roster from the coverage of the NLRA — independent contractors cannot form a certified union with compulsory bargaining rights. Without a union, there is no mechanism through which fighters as a group can demand to see audited revenue figures, propose a percentage split, or strike over its rejection. Each fighter negotiates individually, and the informational asymmetry in those negotiations heavily favors the promoter, which holds full revenue data while the fighter holds almost none.
That asymmetry is precisely what the Le v. Zuffa antitrust class action alleged was anticompetitive: not merely that pay was low, but that the structure of exclusive contracts and the absence of rival promoters capable of credibly bidding for top talent made individual negotiation effectively toothless. The $375 million settlement, reached in 2024, resolved the damages claim without a verdict on liability.
The Professional Fighters League introduced a published season prize structure and has described a revenue-share model as a design goal, though it has not published audited figures against revenue. ONE Championship's model ties fighter pay partly to event production budgets under a promotional contract structure that differs from a CBA in every legal sense. Neither organization has a certified collective bargaining agent on the other side of its pay structure.
The gap, then, is reproducible by design. A sport in which athletes are independent contractors operating under exclusive promotional agreements, where no sanctioning body requires revenue disclosure and no collective bargaining obligation exists, will produce a fundamentally different compensation ratio than one where a certified union sat across from ownership for months and signed a document requiring a specific percentage. The percentage is the outcome; the union is the mechanism.