To speak of Georges St-Pierre is to speak of one of the eminences of mixed martial arts. At 40 years old, the Canadian can boast of innumerable achievements on the octagon (UFC champion in two divisions) and has even recently collaborated with Marvel again to exploit his facet as an actor by giving life to a villain in the series 'Falcon and the Winter Soldier'.
Now he has just been honored in his hometown, Saint-Isidore, where a bronze statue has been installed. But up to his current status, GSP was forced not only to win matches in the octagon, but to play his cards very well outside of it, as he has explained in Wealthsimple Magazine. "UFC won't pay you fairly unless you make it possible," he begins by expressing.
GSP revealed that he was paid $3,000 for his debut against Karo Parisyan at UFC 46 in 2004, plus another $3,000 for winning. That same year he ended up challenging for the welterweight title against Matt Hughes, a fight he lost by submission and for which he took home a purse of $9,000, according to what he said. The fighter then had no choice but to climb again.
He took the belt from Hughes in 2007, which he knocked out, but then fell to Matt Serra in his first defense. In 2008 he again won the title challenge against Jon Fitch, and that's when Georgres played his best hand. "Other organizations wanted to headline me and the UFC knew that. So like a poker bluff, we said, 'We don't want to re-sign before the fight, we just want to terminate the contract.' We took a big risk because this is like the stock market. Your shares can go up if you're successful, but they can also go down if you lose. But that's what we decided to do," said the Canadian.
GSP, won the game before he even had to show his hand: "I took a big risk and told the UFC I wasn't going to re-sign with them. And then the day before my fight with Jon Fitch, the UFC came back with a big and crazy contract because they didn't want me to become a free agent," he detailed, and went further.
"Did you read that I made $400,000 a fight? No. I made a lot more than that. A lot more than that. Millions. When I was at the top of my career, I was making many millions of dollars. Because you don't just get the check for fighting and win, but you also have a percentage of the box office and pay per view, and that's where the real money is. That's how fighters make money. But you need to have the power to negotiate those terms, "said the artist martial.
This power allowed him to make a triumphant return in 2017, with which he profited widely and crowned his career as middleweight champion: "Because of the fight with Michael Bisping, with the pay per view, the sponsorship and all that, I won around 10 million dollars," he confessed. In addition, he boasts: "I am very healthy and I am rich. It is very rare to find someone who hangs up the gloves and ends up on top like this."
At this point, St-Pierre mentioned that he was not spending money "on jewelry and stuff", but rather invested the money in improving sports, in the purest Michael Jordan style: "My window to earn money fighting would have closed earlier if I hadn't invested in my career. He sought out the best trainers from all over the world, hired the most outstanding fighters to train with him and bought numerous tools that helped him in his physical recovery. "I never would have had the career that I had. I knew my career was going to be too short to spend my money on luxury," he added.
