As UFC president Dana White predicted, the battle between UFC and Bellator for the services of star fighter Eddie Alvarez has gotten “ugly.”
Alvarez, the former Bellator lightweight champion, said Monday on “The MMA Hour” on MMAFighting.com that Bellator is suing him for signing with the UFC, because the organization claims he is in breach of his initial contract.
Bellator had the right to match any contract offer given to Alvarez, 28, by a competing organization. Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney told The Post last week that Bellator “matched the offer – deal point for deal point, dollar for dollar, every element of it.”
Alvarez, arguably Bellator’s biggest star, vehemently disagrees. He told “MMA Hour” host Ariel Helwani that the difference between the two contracts is comparable to “fine dining” vs. “McDonald’s” and “the UFC’s deal is much greater.”
“We don’t believe it was matched at all,” Alvarez said. “I want to be able to give the details to you guys, but I’m not allowed because we’re in the middle of a pending lawsuit. What I can say is what I said on Twitter the other day. If I wanted to go to dinner with one guy who asked me to dinner, and another guy asks me to do dinner, and the intentions of guy number one is to take me into a fine dining restaurant and to eat lobster, and the intention of the second guy is to maybe take me to McDonald’s, guy number two just believes that dinner is dinner. Dinner isn’t dinner, there’s a huge difference when you’re talking McDonald’s or some fine dining, the two we don’t believe are comparable.”
Rebney told MMAFighting.com that the UFC offered Alvarez a $250,000 signing bonus and a $70,000 fight purse with a $70,000 win bonus for his initial fight with the organization. Those salaries would escalate over the course of the deal. The contract is for eight fights or 40 months, whichever comes first.
Alvarez was also offered a share of pay-per-view revenue, which is something dicey for Bellator, because it airs on Spike TV with no current PPV plan. But Rebney said that Bellator matched that money anyway and would honor it if Alvarez fights on pay-per-view for the organization — even though it didn’t have to.
“There is no guaranteed pay-per-view in the UFC offer to Eddie Alvarez,” he says emphatically. “We as Bellator don’t have to match projections. We don’t have to match what could conceptually happen. We have to match guaranteed dollars and what the UFC contractually guaranteed would occur. That is what we are held to.”
Rebney also said Alvarez is suing Bellator.
When asked by a fan on Twitter later Monday, Alvarez wrote that he believes that he’d have to wait a full year before signing with UFC as part of his initial Bellator contract. The Philadelphia native has become extremely disenfranchised by the entire process.
“I thought, where I grew up and where I’m from, when someone smiles at you and tells you something, you believe it,” Alvarez said. “If someone lies to you, if someone’s a man of their word, that’s that. It’s very simple. That’s the reality of where I’ve been and where I’m from. But this is a different ballgame, man. I’d get eaten alive in this world, because what people say means nothing. It means nothing. Being loyal and them sort of things, that kind of goes out the window.”
Rebney told The Post last week that he believes Alvarez will be back in a Bellator cage “in relatively short order.” That certainly doesn’t seem to be the case with a lawsuit pending. And when Alvarez is able to fight again is very much up in the air.
“It’s up to the courts now, man,” he said. “I’m being sued, it’s going to go before a judge.”