Dollar For Dollar, Word For Word: Bellator Boss Says They Matched UFC’s Offer To Alvarez | MMA NEWS

“I’ve got wild respect for Ed. In our contract with Ed, exactly like the UFC has in their contracts, we have the right to match. Ed went out and got an offer from the UFC, and we took a look at that offer, reviewed it for about eight days, and decided to match it dollar for dollar, deal point for deal point, term for term. We matched every single element of it, word for word.

We matched the deal, and literally just signed it and sent it to him. Because that’s what our contract requires us to do, we matched it and sent it to him signed. So if he were to send it back signed, we’d be off and running and we could start looking at scheduling; we could start figuring out what’s next immediately.

……

“I will tell you point blank, no questions asked, we matched it dollar for dollar, term for term and section for section,” he said. “To avoid any kind of ambiguity, let me make clear, we took the UFC contract, we took it out of the PDF format, we changed the name ‘UFC’ to ‘Bellator’ and we signed it. We didn’t alter a word, we didn’t alter a phrase, we didn’t alter a section, we didn’t alter a dollar figure.”

“There is no guaranteed pay-per-view in the UFC offer to Eddie Alvarez,” he says emphatically. “We as Bellator don’t have to match projections. We don’t have to match what could conceptually happen. We have to match guaranteed dollars and what the UFC contractually guaranteed would occur. That is what we are held to.”

The main bullet points of the 40-page UFC offer to Alvarez was a $250,000 signing bonus and a $70,000 fight purse with a $70,000 win bonus for his first fight, with salaries escalating over the life of the deal. The contract was to cover a span of 40 months or eight fights, whichever occurred earlier.”

With Bellator FC trying to become a major player in the MMA world, they have done what other promotions dared do in the past.

Go head to head with the UFC.

Not only have they taken their slot on SPIKE tv, but now, in a never-before-seen (at least in MMA) free-agency signing, they have matched the UFC’s bid on a fighter, binding Eddie Alvarez to stay with them and fight.

We reported earlier that Alvarez is being sued by Bellator, but in this lengthy excerpt from an interview, Bellator Boss, Bjorn Rebney, told MMAWeekly.com and MMAFighting that they matched the offer made by the UFC and believe they have held up their end of the deal.