Ronda Rousey was more than ready to make her return in the UFC until the promotion inked a new deal with Paramount that changed everything.
Months prior to the announcement that she would be facing Gina Carano in her first fight back in almost a decade, the former UFC women’s bantamweight champion reached out to Dana White to broker a deal for her comeback. Rousey has always maintained a close relationship with the UFC CEO and she says when she first approached White with the idea, he was very much on board.
“I asked Dana if he would be interested and he’s like ‘of course, I’d be interested,’” Rousey told The Jim Rome Show. “He sent me this voice memo when I can tell he’s super excited about something because he stutters and he’s stuttering all over the place. I’m like he’s down!
“He reached out to Gina and she said that she’d already lost 25 pounds and the walk back into the cage again was something that she’s always wanted to do so that’s when the talks started happening.”
At the time, Rousey said she was still nine months pregnant so the fight wasn’t going to happen right away but she was targeting a New Year’s date as the ideal landing spot for the showdown against Carano.
But after she gave birth, Rousey explained that Carano still needed a little more time to get prepared so that pushed the fight deeper into 2026. By then, the UFC had inked a new $7.7 billion deal to move from ESPN to Paramount with pay-per-views being eliminated entirely, which was a huge part of Rousey’s planned compensation for her return.
Rousey, like many prominent fighters in the UFC along with most champions, earned bonuses based on pay-per-view sales and that would have meant a huge increase in her overall salary.
“Originally, I wanted to do it for New Year’s and I went to [Dana] and I’m like you always say I’m the best fighter you ever worked with, reward me for it,” Rousey said. “Don’t punish me for being easy to work with. Give me the best deal you ever gave anybody. He’s like ‘all right, I’m going to go back and get you the best deal I’ve ever had.’ He came back and literally brought me a deal where I would make more per pay-per-view buy than anybody in history. Like if I hit my historical numbers, which I know we would have been able to exceed, I would have made as much as I did in my entire career.
“I was like hell yeah Dana, high five, thanks! But Gina needed more time [to get ready] and it happened to go to the other side when the ESPN deal and the pay-per-view model would be ending and it would be going to streaming [on Paramount+].”
Once the UFC orchestrated the move to Paramount and pay-per-view was dead, Rousey went back to White to see what he would offer under the new terms where she would no longer receive that huge bonus based on total sales for the card.
Rousey revealed that’s when the bottom fell out in her negotiations with the UFC.
“They’re now a publicly traded company and how do I put it — they didn’t want to set a precedent of giving me the guaranteed money that I deserve because once I raise that tide, it lifts all the boats,” Rousey said. “They just made a $7.7 billion deal at Paramount so it’s in their best interest actually not to put on the best fights possible but to spend as little money as possible so they can keep it.
“Dana is now legally obligated to maximize shareholder value. It’s not just proving the concept of fighting and putting on the best fights possible and this is a sport to be taken seriously. I think now that they’ve sold the company, it’s out of Dana’s hands unfortunately. Now it’s falling onto Hunter Campbell and UFC [corporate] where they don’t care about putting on the best fights possible. They care about putting on the most cost effective fights possible.”
White has repeatedly stated that fighters wouldn’t lose money under the new Paramount deal but instead he expected salaries to increase. Add to that, he’s never shown concern about adjusting deals for bigger draws and champions who previously received pay-per-view bonuses but Rousey obviously claims that definitely wasn’t the deal for her.
Once UFC made it clear there wasn’t going to be a sizable increase in her guaranteed pay, Rousey decided not to return to her old stomping grounds and instead struck a deal with Jake Paul and his Most Valuable Promotions.
“So it no longer made sense for me to go over there because they didn’t want to pay us the money we deserve,” Rousey said. “Because then from the rest of the time the deal, they’re going to have to pay everybody else more. So then I decided to look elsewhere.”
After signing with Most Valuable Promotions, the Rousey vs. Carano fight was sold to Netflix, which is now where the fight is going to air on May 16., Much like the Paramount deal for the UFC, Netflix doesn’t charge subscribers additional money for the big one-off events like when Paul fought Mike Tyson or the recent Canelo Alvarez vs. Terence Crawford fight.
But it seems Netflix was willing to pay a lot more money to Rousey and Carano than the UFC so now the fight is going there instead.
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