Strikeforce/EliteXC Salaries Revealed

[Bateman]

Main event winner and new Strikeforce world middleweight champion Cung Le ($200,000) and former title-holder Frank Shamrock ($300,000) split 75 percent of the total fight purse from Saturday's Strikeforce/EliteXC main event.

MMAjunkie.com today obtained the total fighter payroll from the California State Athletic Commission.

Saturday's event, which took place at the HP Pavilion in San Jose, Calif., drew 15,192 attendees (14,710 paid) for a total live gate of $1,117,855.

The total disclosed payroll for the show was $667,850.

The full amounts included:

Cung Le ($200,000) def. Frank Shamrock ($300,000)
Drew Fickett ($10,000) def. Jae S. Lim ($3,000)
Gilbert Melendez ($50,000) def. Gabe Lemley ($7,000)
Wayne Cole ($10,000) def. Mike Kyle ($10,000)
Joey Villasenor ($36,000) def. Ryan Jensen ($6,000)
Billy Evangelista ($10,000) def Marlon Sims ($2,500)
Tiki Ghosn ($8,000) def. Luke Stewart ($6,000)
Darren Uyenoyama ($4,000) def. Anthony Figueroa ($2,000)
Jesse Jones ($2,150) def. Jesse Gillespie ($1,200)
"Win" bonuses went to Fickett ($5,000), Cole ($5,000), Villasenor ($18,000), Evangelista ($5,000) Ghosn ($2,000), Uyenoyama ($2,000) and Jones ($500).

Now, the usual disclaimer: the figures do not include deductions for items such as insurance, licenses and taxes. Additionally, the figures do not include money paid by sponsors, which can oftentimes be a substantial portion of a fighter's income. In other words, these are simply base salaries reported to the commission and do not represent the total amounts earned by each fighter.

Compare that to the WEC payouts Looks like the guys at EliteXC are still on a much lower cut than the guys over at the UFC.

I saw a while back the lowest payout tier was around $4k for a UFC fight night match-up.

[MMA Guru]

Yeah, $500 bones is pretty meager. I wonder if that's because they were selling the PPV so cheap and the seats looked like they were fairly cheap too. I'd say that fans would be willing to pay more for the fighters to be paid more. But that's like giving to a charity, you never really know where the money's actually going to.

[leesel]

Originally Posted by MMA Guru

Yeah, $500 bones is pretty meager. I wonder if that's because they were selling the PPV so cheap and the seats looked like they were fairly cheap too. I'd say that fans would be willing to pay more for the fighters to be paid more. But that's like giving to a charity, you never really know where the money's actually going to.

True but tickets to see the UFC are crazy expensive too. I love GSP and Quebec is where I grew up but no way could I justify spending that much monaie on going to an UFC event.