Former Bellator Champ Makovsky Accuses Bellator Of Making Him Fight For Less Pay Than Contracted

Former Bellator Lightweight Champion, Eddie Alvarez, has been in a legal dispute with the Bellator promotion for the past several months.

Now another former champion, still signed with the promotion, has come out with an interesting tale that really portrays some questionable insight to how the Bellator promotion takes care of their fighters.

Where there is smoke, there is fire and I’m sure it’s safe to assume that these instances are not isolated to just Zach Makovsky and Eddie Alvarez.

“Just before the Dantas fight, I had added some additional fights onto my contract for a potential raise,” Makovsky told BloodyElbow.com. “If I were to beat Dantas, my pay scale would have gone up pretty significantly, and if I lost to Dantas, my pay scale would have stayed where it was. In that deal I put in that they have to have… they were going to give me three fights every 14 months. Which is a reason they gave me why, on releasing me. They said that they just couldn’t keep me active enough to fulfill that end of their agreement.

“The issue I had was that… so when I signed [those] additional fights to my contract, I had a potential raise against Dantas, and if I lost the fight I was supposed to go back to where I was. But Bellator has it that you’re at a certain rate, and if you win your pay goes up by 1,000/1,000 for your next fight and if you lose it stays the same. It never decreases. I won the tournament, I had two non title fights, so my pay scale increased for each of those fights. Then I signed this new part of the contract to fight Dantas, and if I lost I should have went back to where I was, not the original [salary], which is what they offered me. Basically what happened was, they weren’t going to give me another fight in 2012, besides Dantas. I had to kind of really push to get that fight with Leone. And then when I got the bout contract it was for 2,000 and 2,000 less than what I believe my contract said I should be fighting for.”

“What they did say was, that if I insisted on getting what my contract said, they wouldn’t be able to afford to put me on the card to fight for that, and that they could offer me this 2,000/2,000 less,” Makovsky explained. “So if I wanted to fight this year it’s basically… and it was my choice to accept the fight, but it was like ‘you can accept this, or you can wait till next year and fight and do whatever.’ That rubbed me obviously very poorly.

“I only had one [fight at that point in 2012] and I lost, so I didn’t have my win bonus. This is all I do right now, so I definitely needed at least a second fight in a year. I kind of had to accept those terms. It was unfortunate, and I did what I had to do because I needed a fight. That’s the story there and Eddie knew about it because we’re good friends and we talk. I never wanted to bring it up.”