The tweets started trickling out in late November. One might fairly describe them as disgruntled.
Bellator bantamweight champion Patchy Mix called it “frustrating” to have two straight fights canceled. Light heavyweight champion Corey Anderson wrote that he was “aging like warm cheese” waiting for his next fight to be booked. Featherweight champion Patricio Pitbull said he’d waited most of the year for a fight, then spent money on a training camp when he was finally given a date and an opponent, only to end up having the fight called off a month prior.
“We have no clue about when we might be fighting after two fight cancellations in a row,” Bellator bantamweight contender Leandro Higo wrote on X. “Time is of the essence in this game, we can’t waste our primes on the sidelines. I’m working hard to take that title, spending money, sweat and blood. What’s going on?”
This is the question many fighters on the Bellator roster are asking lately — and no answers seem to be forthcoming. After PFL bought Bellator from Paramount Global in November of 2023, company executives outlined plans to keep Bellator going as a separate, “reimagined” entity in 2024.
But as the year draws to a close, many Bellator fighters have taken to social media to complain of being shelved with little to no information on the company’s future plans for them. They remain under contract, unable to sign with another promotion like the UFC, but say they aren’t being offered fights.
Duke Roufus, the longtime coach of former Bellator bantamweight champion Sergio Pettis, was one of the first to take his complaints public.
“Sergio was supposed to fight on the [Nov. 29] card in Saudi Arabia, and the fight was pulled off the card,” Roufus said. “Word around the campfire was that it was because of finances, and that’s never a good thing to hear in this business. People say they’re waiting for an influx of money to come in, but a lot of these guys are at critical points in their careers. They don’t have time to waste on the bureaucracy of organization wars.”
Publicly, PFL executives have stayed mostly quiet on the subject. PFL officials did not reply to repeated requests for comment for this story. On X, where PFL chairman Donn Davis is an active poster, replies to virtually every tweet he sends are littered with fans asking about the status of Bellator fighters or demanding they be released from their contracts. Still, there’s been no public reply from anyone at PFL to lend clarity to the situation.
Some fighters say they were granted permission to fight in Japan’s Rizin organization while still under contract with Bellator. That was the case for bantamweight Juan Archuleta, who won the Rizin bantamweight title before later losing it to Kai Asakura last December. He was then released from his Bellator contract, Archuleta said, which allowed him to continue in Rizin. Some other fighters were given similar opportunities, he noted, but that came with a pay cut from what they’d been making in Bellator prior to the PFL sale.
“Before the sale, Mike Kogan and Scott Coker had bumped all our purses up,” Archuleta said. “They re-signed us and gave us a s*** ton of money for our contracts. Like, a s*** ton. And we were all like, this would be nice if they still honor it, but I already knew going into that change of [ownership] that [PFL wasn’t] going to want to honor those contracts. It’s a lot of money for some guys.”
This appears to be at the heart of former Bellator champion Gegard Mousasi’s lawsuit against the company filed in October. Mousasi alleges that after signing an eight-fight contract extension with built-in escalators set to take effect in the second half of the deal, Bellator essentially stopped offering him fights.
Mousasi was released from his contract in May after voicing his discontent publicly in several interviews on the subject. Now he is seeking damages of at least $15 million, alleging not only breach of contract but also accusing Bellator and PFL of misclassifying him as an independent contractor.
MMA history has seen several instances of one promotion buying another, only to then experience some sticker shock at the price of some of the existing contracts. But as Roufus pointed out, despite the many complaints about fighter pay in the UFC, there were no such complaints about a refusal to honor contracts after the UFC purchased rivals like PRIDE FC and Strikeforce.
“You see this all the time with companies that come out and say they’re going to be the alternative to the UFC and they’re going to treat the fighters better,” Roufus said. “But I’ll say this: Next year will be my 20th year coaching fighters in the UFC. I’ve worked with elite guys to entry-level guys, and I’ve never seen the UFC renege on a contract or not pay a guy what he was owed or just shelve a guy like this. They always do what they say they’re going to do, and they usually do extra.”
Speaking to reporters after UFC 310 earlier this month, UFC CEO Dana White expressed sympathy with those fighters voicing their frustrations about the lack of bout offers.
“The last couple months we’ve been talking a lot about the PFL,” White said. “They’re canceling a lot of shows. I know a lot of guys that are supposed to fight, aren’t fighting. You guys know what the f*** is going on. When you see that start to happen, you’re running out of money. Things aren’t looking good, and you’re going to have people that want to jump ship.”
For now, those who might like to jump are instead being held in limbo. The wait for fights — and answers — goes on.
