FloGrappling general manager Ben Kovacs says the economics of professional grappling rarely add up, and that UFC BJJ is a prime example.
He laid out the case on The Ageless Warrior Lab with host Dave Meyer, starting with the live show:
I think we need to shorten the events. People just don’t care about 99.999% of Jiu-Jitsu. They only care about certain matchups and high-stakes things.
He named F2W as one of the few promotions that pencils out:
It’s a lot, and everybody’s selling their own tickets… He has very controlled venue costs. He gets people to sell the tickets for him. He doesn’t offer big prize money.
Prize money, Kovacs said, is where bigger leagues like WNO run into trouble.
He recalled talks with a BJJ star about an Austin event:
I was like: “Hey, I think we might do a WNO in Austin on this date.” And he was like: “Yeah, I want $170,000.”
And I was like: “How about this?… We’ll give you $40,000.”
And he was like: “No, $100,000 minimum.”
He traced those expectations to Gordon Ryan’s old Flo deal:
What was worth $100,000 to pay Gordon is literally worth $400 to pay you… He was a hundred times or a thousand times different.
The same gap between payouts and audience demand, he said, is hurting UFC BJJ:
UFC already went to the participatory tournaments. I mean, they have more data than anybody in the world… They’re losing money putting on these big UFC BJJs, I guarantee it. There’s just no way.
I know what people get paid and I know what a production costs to do, and there’s no way they’re making money doing these things, right?
On the move to UFC’s subscription service, he ran a quick estimate:
Imagine it’s five bucks a month or something, and imagine they sold 10,000 pay-per-views for their last event.
That’s $50,000. That doesn’t even cover like a third of the cost of the main event…
Everybody in Jiu-Jitsu thinks all these companies are big and bad and making all this money, but the truth is, just look at the math.
It doesn’t really math out.
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