The UFC might not force fighters to take fights, but through some underhanded practices, it doesn’t make things easy for them to decline bouts under terms that fighters might not find favorable.
Does the following scenario sound familiar?
A tweet from ESPN, who is the UFC broadcast partner, appears. The tweet says UFC is “working on booking Fighter A vs. Fighter B.” Sometimes these would end with something like, “contracts not signed.”
The next step — and maybe the most influential — in this scenario is fan excitement on social media.
Somewhere between those two steps, one of those fighters — or perhaps both — wonders what the hell the UFC is doing in “announcing” a fight that isn’t official.