“The Predator” goes in-depth on the purse and positive treatment he received from Saudi Arabia for his Riyadh Season “super” fight against Tyson Fury.
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However well (or poorly) the Francis Ngannou vs. Tyson Fury fight did on pay-per-view (, there’s no doubt Ngannou earned a ton of money nearly dethroning the heavyweight king.
LIFE-CHANGING MONEY.
Leading up to the fight, the number we kept hearing for Ngannou’s purse was $10 million. And while “The Predator” will neither confirm nor deny these numbers, he is giving us context on how much he was paid in comparison to his days in Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).
“First off all, whatever would have been my next fight, from the moment that I left the UFC, was going to be way different from what I made,” he said on The Last Stand podcast.
“Because in the past three years in the UFC, I was in a contract issue that I didn’t want to sign a new contract that would have given me more money, but not enough, right? Also the conditions and the terms which would have prevented me from doing boxing, which was one of my ultimate dreams that I wanted to do.
“So, it would have been different, even from my next MMA fight, completely different,” Ngannou continued. “It’s at least more than everything that I have earned in my life, in my career. You have to understand that I wasn’t getting much pay.
“My salary, basically from the beginning, your salary starts very low,” Ngannou added. “It’s like 10k/10k and all that stuff. Moving your way up, you get to the point where you still get out there with almost ten fights, struggling. So … it was a lot different. And the treatment was also completely different. The treatment was royal.
“We can’t go without mentioning that,” Ngannou concluded. “They gave me the royal treatment for my family, get my family on the ring, get them travel, put them on the ringside to watch me fight. Treat them, take them out to visit the city, everything.”
Francis Ngannou's family are in high spirits after his fight with Tyson Fury 🥊
He truly did them proud ❤️🇨🇲#BattleOfTheBaddest | #FuryNgannou | #TysonFury | #FrancisNgannou pic.twitter.com/XJwDopyNLA
— Boxing on TNT Sports (@boxingontnt) October 29, 2023
Compare that to UFC, which provides two plane tickets to a fighter: one for themselves and one for a corner. The other two corners? Flight costs for them come out of the fighter’s purse, along with a ton of other expenses UFC doesn’t cover.
Expensive discounts.
It’s no surprise that Ngannou is extremely happy now. He went from UFC, which is notorious for penny pinching, to a valued member of Saudi Arabia’s sports roster. There was never going to be a comparison between what they pay and UFC. But, we don’t need big Dubai money to recognize how low the pay and poor the treatment is in UFC.
It’s night and day.
