Randy Couture went on the Adam Carolla show and claimed that he and Fedor would each take home $6 to $10 million for their long awaited bout. Pramit Mohapatra breaks down the numbers on Randy's "projections" for his payday should a fight with Fedor take place:
Let's take a rough look at Couture's statements and see if he's being realistic. First, here are my assumpions: let's assume that the Randy-Fedor PPV sells for $50, that the PPV broadcaster takes 50% of the PPV cut, and that the event sells out a 15,000-seat arena.
At $50 a pop, 700,000 PPV buys gives us $35 million in PPV revenue. Give the PPV broadcaster half and the promotion ends up with $17.5 million.
Now, UFC 87 (with an announced attendance in the neighborhood of 15,000) made a reported live gate of $2.2 million. Let's be generous and say that Randy-Fedor garners a live gate of $3 million.
That gives the promotion a revenue of $20.5 million. Remember, this is revenue and not profit. In other words, we haven't considered the cost of producing the event, marketing costs, the cost of renting the arena, and -- as we've learned this week -- taxes. We also haven't considered the pay for undercard fighters. Or, the cut the promotion itself will take off the top.
Even without all of these costs factored in, Couture's estimate of a $12-20 million total payout for both him and Fedor seems very unrealistic.
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