Veteran UFC fighter Matt Brown didn’t hold back when addressing Renato Moicano’s stance on the recent UFC antitrust lawsuit settlement. Moicano stirred up controversy after revealing he was turning down the money owed to him from the $375 million payout. He claimed he had already agreed to the terms of his previous contract and didn’t feel the need to accept any additional compensation.
Moicano, who made his UFC debut in 2014, is among the fighters eligible for payment under the terms of the lawsuit settlement, which covers athletes who competed in the UFC between 2010 and 2017. Despite nearly 97% of eligible fighters opting in, Moicano publicly rejected the payout. That decision didn’t sit well with Brown, who also stands to receive a cut of the settlement.
On an episode of The Fighter vs. The Writer, Matt Brown expressed serious doubts about Moicano’s claims.
“I question whether that’s true or not, too. I think Moicano may be saying that in public but I don’t know if that’s truly the case in reality, though,” Brown said. “I question that strongly knowing some inside things.”
Brown didn’t mince words about how he views Moicano’s public statement.
“There’s very, very few people that haven’t signed up to get their money. I doubt that Moicano’s one of them to be honest. It doesn’t make him look better saying that. I don’t think anybody is like ‘wow, bro, you’re fcking brand loyal, good for you!’ No, everybody’s like you’re a fcking idiot for this.”
Moicano tried to explain his decision by pointing to his loyalty to the contract he signed at the time, calling it a “huge deal” in his career. However, Brown, who spent 15 years under the UFC banner, knows that kind of loyalty rarely pays off.
Things have changed drastically since Brown first joined the UFC, what once felt like a tightly run family business is now just another massive corporation after Endeavor purchased the company for over $4 billion in 2016. For Brown, the lawsuit payout is simply another business move by the promotion to avoid potentially bigger losses at trial.
“It’s a corporation now. You’re not changing Dana’s day at all [by taking the money],” Brown said. “Once the lawsuit was settled, Dana [White] did not think it for one second after that. He claims he didn’t think about it before that but I doubt that’s actually the case. But after it was settled, it was a drop in the bucket for them, the amount of money. It’s a f*cking write-off for them, too, of all things, which is not a write-off for us. We have to pay taxes on it but it’s a write-off for the UFC, which is insanity to me.”
Brown compared it to a situation where a giant company like Apple pays out a class-action lawsuit and some consumers reject the money out of misplaced loyalty.
“It’s from a corporation. It’s like if Apple had a class action lawsuit against them and had to pay out and then you said ‘No, I love my iPhone.’ It’s literally the same thing. The money’s already paid out.”
According to Brown, Moicano’s decision speaks to a much deeper issue within the MMA world. The UFC holds a near-monopoly in the sport, and fighters often find themselves chasing the organization’s validation instead of fighting for fair compensation.
“What this sport has become, the way that the UFC has built it is not proper,” Brown said. “What it leads to the way it’s built if you’re Dana White, it’s proper, if you’re on the business side, you sold your business for $4 billion, you did the right thing for yourself and your company. The business doesn’t care about doing things right. The business cares about making money and that’s what the business is there for.”
In Brown’s eyes, fighters should be the ones being courted and rewarded, not the other way around.
“The promoters should be competing for the fighters. With the way the UFC has been structured and built is the fighters are competing for Dana’s acknowledgment and Dana’s love. That is completely opposite the way it should be.”
Brown sees Moicano’s refusal to take the money as a sad reflection of how warped things have become.
“Moicano, rather than taking money that he fought for as a prizefighter, he wants Dana’s love and acknowledgment more than the money, thinking that it’s going to get him more money in the future. That should be a very fcking clear sign of how flipped this script is and how fcked up it really is.”
With Matt Brown continuing to speak out, the spotlight is now firmly on fighters who may be sacrificing their own earnings in pursuit of corporate approval, a move that could cost them far more in the long run.
