One of the very best lightweights in the world can now take offers from the world’s largest MMA promotion.
Eddie Alvarez, the former Bellator World Lightweight
Champion, whose contract recently ran out with Bellator, has been given
permission to start taking offers from other MMA organizations, including the
UFC, immediately.
scrum with Toronto-area MMA media following Bellator 79, which took place
Friday night at Casino Rama in Ontario, Canada.
just because I’ve known Ed forever and he’s a buddy of mine,” Rebney said. “I
already sent him the paperwork and said go talk to them. He told me he loved
Bellator but he needs to make sure he takes the right deal for his family, so I
said, ‘OK, go talk to them.’”
back and competing in the upcoming lightweight tournament during the
promotion’s debut season on Spike TV, at the end of the day, whether or not
they match the UFC’s offer will be based solely on economic factors.
economics,” Rebney said. “One of the reasons we’re here and Strikeforce, the
WEC, the IFL, Elite XC and all these groups have filtered off, is because so
many decsions were based on emotions, on ego, whereas ours are empirically
based on an Excel spreadsheet. We look at situations, we look at numbers — we
don’t make decisions on emotions, we run (our promotion) like a business.”
Alvarez was former Bellator World Middleweight Champion Hector Lombard, who
earlier this year was offered a big-money deal with the UFC that Bellator chose
not to match.
pricey at the time, now that the organization is ready to make the big move to
Spike, they have some extra money to play with, so while they didn’t match the
Lombard deal, they may be able to match a likely UFC contract offer Alvarez.
close proximity of the Spike launch. It’s given us some more ammunition,” he
said. “Hector’s deal, it was a $400,000 signing bonus, $300,000 a fight and
climbing, plus a huge piece of pay-per-view. That’s a very lucrative deal.
You’ve got to have a different business paradigm in place to monetize a deal
like that. It’s very difficult to get under a deal like that unless you have
PPVs that are doing good numbers. The UFC has those PPVs – they haven’t been
strong as of late – but when the UFC signed Hector, they had some bigger PPVs
where they could monetize a deal like that.
“But we’re not in the PPV business, so if that kind of deal
comes, Eddie will probably fight in the UFC. But if it’s a different structure,
maybe he fights for us. But I told Ed we can provide other things for him. Look
what we’re doing for King Mo, Mike Chandler, Pat Curran, doing one-hour biopics
on them that build up their brand. There are other shows across the MTV network
platform we can plug guys in to build their brand equity. On a pure economic
basis, we’ll see (if we’ll match the Alvarez contract) when the offer comes.”
that is nearly certain is that he’ll need to win another tournament in order to
get another crack at Chandler, who he lost the lightweight title to nearly one
year ago, as Rebney doesn’t want to depart from the tournament format that is
the bedrock of his brand.
“It would very, very difficult to do that in our structure,” Rebney said of letting Alvarez skip the tournament for a rematch with Chandler.“It would be virtually impossible to do that. I’ve tried to think 1000 times
around it how structurally you can do it. Ed’s been amazing since he lost his
title, but that would be a very difficult dynamic to put into play.”
