Fitch has obviously seen more of the numbers than us, but there's enough out there that we can take an educated guess if he or the author of the article are correct re: their ability to pay $15m for UFC 214. Long nerdy thread 1/ https://twitter.com/jonfitchdotnet/status/1266046570505498624

Estimates are that event sold 860k. Since the estimates seem to typically be 10-15% high, lets say it did 750k. Rev per buy was projected by the UFC for 2017 at $33.86 for cable & sat & more for digital, so $26.5m in residential PPV seems realistic. 2/

Gate for the event was reported at $2.4m by the CSAC. Doubt there was a site fee and since we don't know what they made from VIP Experience and Fight Club we'll use that for the live event revenue. 3/

Commercial PPV (close circuit at bars) averages about $3.5m an event. Since most of that is from year long subscriptions by bars it doesn't fluctuate much but a bigger event like this will do better than others so $4m for commercial seems plausible. 4/

Sponsorship in 2017 is estimated to be about $60 million, 1/2 contracted across all events. So pro rated with the non contracted allocated to PPVs would give us $3m in sponsor revenue. More again for the bigger events so lets say $4m for 214. 5/

The UFC also aired the prelims of the event on FXX. The FOX deal didn't pay as much for prelims for the current ESPN deal but would have added another $1m or so, more than enough to cover the prelim fighter costs. (also serves as free marketing for PPV & increases sponsor $) 6/

That's $38m total in revenue. Now for expenses. UFC's production costs were on average about $1.5m an event. Since this was a bigger event with a bigger fight week, let's say $2m to be conservative. 7/

UFC historically spent 9% of their revenue on marketing w/85% of it on event marketing. After Endeavor purchased them this was projected to go down to 7% of revenue w/ 65% of it on event marketing. That would be a $3m avg per PPV if PPVs were the only events they marketed. 8/

Now fighter expenses. Reported purses for everyone but Jones and Cormier was $2.1m. Add in of the night bonuses and it's $2.3m. UFC also gives out discretionary bonuses but they're typically a few thousand. Let's add another $200k to be generous. So $2.5m total. 9/

But there was also another title fight on the card, Woodley v. Maia. Woodley is going to get PPV points for this fight. At the standard PPV rate he would make an additional $1m. And Maia deserves something extra as a challenger (probably more than he got) say $500k disc bonus.10/

So total revenue is $38m & total event expenses $9m excluding Jones & Cormier. So that's $29m in net for DC, Jones & the UFC to split. (although Jones and Cormier wouldn't get anything from the value their event added to the UFC's commercial PPV and sponsor packages) 11/

Since this event did about 550k more ppv buys than the median that year (almost $20m more in revenue) you'd think the headliners would have a strong argument that $ was generated by them (this is called the Marginal Revenue Product) & thus deserve a large % of it. 12/

If this was boxing, Cormier and Jones could be getting up to 85% of the net, or $25 million, which they would then split. Of course the split is much lower in MMA, which is what this whole argument is about. 13/

So should Cormier have made $15m for UFC 214? Who knows? But could he have? Yeah, under a different system he might have made $15m while Jones would have made $10m. But of course, that's not the system the sport currently operates under. 14/ Fin

I should add that I don't know what Jones or Cormier made for this fight but based on what we know and the % that seems to be standard for the UFC, I would estimate it was it was around $6.5m total between them. So in the $3-4m range for each of them.