Conor McGregor not only won the interim featherweight title on the weekend, he might also be heading home with a fair bit of cash in his pocket.
All the hype and promotion that went into the UFC 189 event this past weekend seems to have paid off, as it's shaping up to be a bit of a record breaker for the UFC. Attendance numbers show it was the second highest attended event in the history of the company, and some of that success will trickle down and end up in Conor McGregor's pocket.
The event had a gate of $7.2m with just over 16,000 fans in attendance, making it the biggest event in the US, while early indications from UFC president Dana White suggested that the pay-per-view (PPV) buys were bigger than UFC 100, which had 1.6 million paying customers.
All of that means that McGregor would take home a pretty healthy paycheque at the end of everything, and Independent.ie have broken down where it might all have come from:
- The official fee for the fight was $500,000, while he also received a 'Performance of the Night' bonus which would have been $50,000
- A proportion of the PPV money for the event would go to Conor also, depending on what he agreed with the UFC. After the buys reach a certain hurdle (normally 100,000), the fighters get a percentage of each sale, which could be anything from $1 to $3. If the event tops UFC 100, then McGregor could be in line for a huge payout, possibly even in the region of $5 million.
- As a challenger for the title, Conor would also have been guaranteed $30,000 from sponsorship money
While a conservative estimate of PPV sales would still mean that he earns over $1 million, those figures above don't even include the money that he makes through his deal with Monster Energy Drinks, as well as the sales of his Reebok UFC fight kit and the sponsorship deal that he signed with Reebok as one of their featured athletes. All in all, things are looking pretty good for McGregor.
Via Independent.ie