Manager takes on peers over sponsorship market woes

To John Fosco, the UFC’s sponsor tax and pop of MMA’s “bubble” is old news.

That’s why the longtime MMA manager is fuming about a story on crowd-funding for MMA, telling MMAjunkie that the push toward sites like FundaFighter is not motivated by a stagnant market, but lazy managers.

The way he sees it, athletes should be under the care of representatives who never put them in the position to ask the general public for money.

“No one is saying, ‘This is the landscape – You have to adapt, you have to change, and you have to find a way,’” said Fosco, who as president of VFD Marketing reps such UFC fighters as Travis Browne, Clay Guida and Derek Brunson. “You sit there and say, ‘Poor me,’ well then it just gives you an excuse not to deliver for your client.

“You shouldn’t be running the business of an athlete through representation if you’re going to say, ‘Poor me.’ It’s your job to find a solution. It’s like welfare versus going out and doing something yourself.

“These guys want welfare, and that’s when FundaFighter comes in. It’s welfare.”

Of course, FundaFighter sees it a little differently. As company founder Robbie Stein recently told MMAjunkie, fighters offer “rewards” of training sessions, autographs, and other perks in exchange for the donations they receive, which help to offset the costs of training and competing. They make a particularly big impact on the bottom lines of those working their way up the ladder on the regional circuit.

But the number that sticks out to Fosco, who primarily reps UFC talent, is the $2,100 average that fighters receive by participating in the program.

“That makes me want to vomit,” said the manager. “Straight up, if I have a guy on [UFC Fight Pass], I can get him $8,000 with my eyes closed. I’ve done way over $10,000 many times for Facebook. The bigger point is how are you adapting.”

What’s clear is that everyone in the MMA industry – fighters, managers, and promoters – is still figuring out how to thrive in a marketplace where available dollars are far more scarce than they were six years ago, when a T-shirt could fetch $20,000.

While simple apparel sponsorships have withered to all-time lows, prompting the UFC to contemplate instituting a sponsorship program for fighters, Fosco believes there’s still money to be made. He is particularly interested in working with companies in emerging markets such as Australia, China and Sweden.

One point he drives at when talking about sponsorship opportunities is that many of them are leveraged outside the cage as opposed to within it, where the UFC maintains a sponsor tax and has strict rules about what companies can be seen in the octagon.

“We make a lot of money outside of the cage,” he said. “Sure, the UFC’s business model is different than other major sports. Some guys aren’t going to get big deals outside the cage if they’re a small fighter, but there’s a lot of money to be made.

“There’s a lot of money in social media; there’s a lot of money in likeness use. And it’s not so much this fighter or that fighter, but an MMA or UFC fighter that has a look.”

It’s these opportunities MMA managers should be chasing, according to Fosco, rather than worrying about an impending UFC uniform deal. The manager believes many are stuck within a small ecosystem of MMA-friendly companies who’ve become very savvy about how and where they spend their dollars. Meanwhile, he said, new companies are not sticking around long enough to have an impact on the marketplace.

“I’m so tired of the majority of my peers,” he said. “They bring companies in, and companies leave. Why? Because they’re not being serviced. Most of my peers just want a check to put a logo on a pair of shorts, and that doesn’t do it. So all these idiots are damaging the sport and their paychecks and the amount of companies we have access to.”

As Stein notes, fighters increasingly are looking for alternatives when it comes to padding their bottom line, and that could be why FundaFighter is drawing more interest than ever. But Fosco also questions whether the crowd-sourcing site isn’t simply acting as a manager or agent. As Stein admits, the site takes 15 percent of the money raised for each fighter’s funding total.

“You take most of what my peers take,” Fosco said. “You’re going into my business, and you’re camouflaging it.”

Fosco, though, believes there’s a larger issue at hand in the business, and that’s thinking small. While no one would argue that dollars aren’t as easy to find these days, he takes issue with anyone complaining about the process.

Were this a publicly traded corporation, he said, the CEO would be talking about the steps taken to evolve with the changing environment, or the executive would be voted out by the company’s shareholders.

“Any manager who wants to talk about how difficult things are right now, I’ll call them out, because they suck,” he said. “They f–king suck. Yeah, things are more challenging now, but there’s a solution for everything. If you can’t find it, you’re going to get passed by because you have no vision, and you don’t belong here.”