Amanda Nunes frustrated by tax change caused by UFC 232 move

By Tom Taylor - December 24, 2018

Add UFC women’s bantamweight champ Amanda Nunes to the growing list of UFC 232 fighters who are frustrated that the card has been moved from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Los Angeles California.

Amanda Nunes

While many other fighters on the card have expressed frustrations about having to adjust their travel plans, Nunes’ main gripe is that she’ll have to pay significantly higher taxes in California than she would in Nevada.

“Well… wasn’t expecting to pay California state taxes this Holiday season,” Amanda Nunes wrote on Twitter (h/t Fansided).

Speaking on Twitter, Dave Doyle of MMAFighting pointed out that the fighters competing on the UFC 232 bill are likely to lose a significant slice of their income due to the card’s shift from Nevada to California.

https://twitter.com/davedoylemma/status/1077040221097771008

“UFC 232 fighters are losing, depending on their income bracket, somewhere between 9.25-13 percent of their purses due to the card being moved from no-tax Nevada to high-tax California,” Doyle explained.

Apparently, this tax spike has nixed Amanda Nunes and fiancee Nina Ansaroff’s plans to buy a new card.

“There goes my new car…” Ansaroff wrote on Twitter.

“Sorry love,” Nunes replied.

In the UFC 232 co-main event, Amanda Nunes will step up to the featherweight division to battle fearsome champion Cris Cyborg in a bid to become a two-division champion. When it was announced that the card was being moved from Nevada to California, some members of the MMA community suggested the UFC should have just cancelled the UFC 232 main event between Jon Jones and Alexander Gustafsson, as it was only Jones’ failure to achieve licensure in Nevada that caused the UFC to move the card. In this event, the UFC could have simply promoted this Amanda Nunes vs. Cris Cyborg superfight to the main event.

According to UFC President Dana White, however, this wasn’t doable.

“You know I’m not afraid to cancel a fight,” White told MMAjunkie on Sunday. “I’m not going to move a whole (expletive) event to Los Angeles because we need Jon Jones to fight on Saturday because money, or we need … none of that (expletive). Jon Jones has trained for this fight. Gustafsson has trained for this fight. This fight needs to happen in this division. This fight should happen, and it’s going to happen because he didn’t do anything wrong.”

This article first appeared on BJPENN.COM on 12/24/2018.


Topics:

Amanda Nunes UFC