UFC Announces New Insurance Plan For Fighters

Added on May 09, 2011 by John Petit in

UFC & MMA

Being a fighter in the UFC just got easier. For a long time as a Mixed Martial Artists, the worst case scenario was to train for a big fight and be injured just weeks out. The promotion you are fighting for, and most sponsors, will not pay you unless you step in the ring/cage to fight. So an injury can send a fighter into financial ruins, or even worse prompt them to fight injured. The UFC, in most cases, have gone above and beyond for taking care of its fighters. As a person who covers the UFC, I routinely hear of cases where the UFC pays fighters or takes care of injuries when not required to. In fact, I think the UFC does this so frequently at this point that the stories don’t get covered as much as other news. The promotion is required to have insurance for injuries during the fights themselves, but the UFC has now announced that as of June 1^st all fighters under the Zuffa banner will accidental insurance that WILL cover them for injuries incurred during training.

Lorenzo Fertitta (Chairman/CEO,) and Lawrence Epstein (General Counsel) from Zuffa both told Yahoo that this was something they have been looking in to for years. Fertitta said that just to get a reputable insurance company to even sit down at the table with them was almost impossible. The nature of the contest itself is to inflict as much damage as you can on another in a five minute span, but he said they weren’t going to give up. Fertitta said “When you go to an underwriter and say, ‘Hey, we potentially want to insure 400 ultimate fighters,’ they pretty much close the door on you pretty quickly. We didn’t just give up, given the responses we were getting and the answers we were getting from a lot of these carriers. We continued on and it has been a 24-to-36-month process we have been going through to do it. We were adamant we were going to find a way to put this together.”

They both explained how Zuffa would pay all of the premiums, and a Zuffa employee would handle the claims side of the business. Fertitta said that they understand fighting and know how dangerous training and fighting can be, but they also implied that they knew this was an inevitability on their part to get this done. Fertitta said “We looked at this as a necessity for the sport and something that needed to happen. We have talked about this for a long time and we have always had the same position when asked how fighters could have insurance outside of the fights. Like we said, it’s tough enough to get insurance just as a business, in and of itself, with how expensive it is.”

Epstein pointed out that this isn’t something the average person would get from their employer. He said this wouldn’t cover Heavyweight Champion Cain Velasquez if he had a head cold, but would help him if something awful happened that would prevent him from fighting. He said “It’s not a policy you would typically see in an employer-employee relationship. It’s more akin to an auto insurance scenario, where any acute injury is going to be covered. Training injuries, a guy falls down the stairs, an automobile accident, those would be covered, but it wouldn’t be something like the flu or some disease or illness. It would only cover accident-related injuries.”

As for who is covered, as of June 1 all Zuffa fighters (UFC and Strikeforce) will be covered from the accidental insurance plan. Epstein said in closing “This will cover accidents that occur while a fighter is under contract with us. Those accidents could occur in training or it could also be something like an automobile accident. A fighter could be driving to the grocery store and gets involved in an automobile accident and has an injury. This policy would cover him.”

I am sure we are only hours away from someone subverting this news into part of some evil nefarious plan that was hatched in a board room at Dana White’s house. However, this is fantastic news for the sport, and hopefully when the UFC demonstrates how safe this is to their insurance company others will follow suit and smaller organizations will be able to afford it. This will put a dent in the argument for fighters union, as one of the claims has always been that the UFC was purposefully ducking costs to make more money. That will be a hard argument to make as now they are going way beyond of what is required by them.