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It's around 40%. You're confusing per fight pay with yearly income. The average income last year for UFC fighters was $150k, but the top guys making millions pulls the average up, and it's about 40% who made 6 figures for the year.What's the top, though? Making it to the NFL as a rookie nets you $750K as a minimum. Same with the NHL. $770K in MLB, $1.1 million in the NBA. What's the minimum in the UFC? How much do fighters coming off the Contender series make? What percentage of the UFC's roster makes over $100K/year? 5%? 10%? 15%? Let's say it is 15%. That would mean that you need to be in the top 15% of the top league in the sport to make 10% of the minimum salary in the NBA. Why would anyone choose that if they had any other options?
Dana and the Fertittas worked exceptionally hard and invested a ton of money to shake the image that nothing but bums and rejects from other sports fight in MMA. They keep this up and it won't be just an image.
And those are all team sports. What does a journeyman boxer or tennis player make, or a bjj player? To get to like 250 in the world in tennis, you've probably played every day since you were like 6 and it cost your parents about $1 million in tournaments, travel and coaching to get you there, and that'll fetch you about $150k in prize money and costs about $100k of that just to do because that's also traveling every week.
The expense for an MMA career is like a few hundred bucks in gym fees and then a percentage of your fight purses after you've already gone pro.
I don't know where you guys came up with this idea that journeymen not getting rich is the big deterrent for MMA. The deterrent for any sport is cost to do it, not whether you'll get rich from it even if you're not that good.
People still play tennis and spend a lot of money on it even though 99.9% of people who spend a lot of money doing it won't ever even recover the costs. People start bands even though none of them will amount to shit.