Kamaru Usman isn’t going to tell Sean Strickland to shut up and fight. The former UFC welterweight champion backed Strickland for complaining about his pay, even though the middleweight champ put his own name on the contract.
Usman made his case on the Pound 4 Pound podcast he hosts with Henry Cejudo, as MMA Junkie reported. He gave the UFC’s side a fair hearing and then landed squarely in the fighter’s corner.
“If you feel like you’re not getting your just due, you’re always going to say something. You’re always going to feel some type of way,” Usman said.
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The backstory is simple. Strickland (31-7 MMA, 18-7 UFC) signed a new UFC deal before he challenged Khamzat Chimaev for the title in May. Then he upset Chimaev at UFC 328. Now he’s negotiating a title defense against Nassourdine Imavov and has made it clear he isn’t happy with the terms he agreed to back when he was the challenger.
That’s the part Usman didn’t dodge. He acknowledged there’s a real argument that a guy who signs a deal should live with it, and he called it a case with points on both sides. He just doesn’t think that argument wins.
“That’s always going to supercede everything. So it doesn’t matter if the noble thing to do here is to shut up and fight these fights out. No,” Usman said.
He described the whole thing as a sucky situation and said fighters have been dealing with this for a long, long time without much changing. Then he gave his bottom line.
“So Sean’s not wrong for feeling the way that he feels.”
Strickland isn’t alone, either. Paulo Costa is also in a rift with the UFC right now, according to MMA Junkie, though his case is different because he has just one fight left on his deal. Usman said Strickland won’t be the first or the last fighter to speak up about money.
“We all know exactly how he’s feeling because we’ve been through it,” Usman said.
He added: “The world is just unfair.”
Usman laid out both sides in one breath. The UFC’s argument, as he framed it, goes like this:
“You signed this deal. You should honor it or be a part of it.”
And Strickland, in Usman’s telling, is the guy who:
“is not wrong for trying to get as much as he can from an unfair world that we are in.”
My take: Usman nailed it, and he did it by answering straight instead of hiding behind the company line. Strickland signed that contract as the guy nobody expected to beat Chimaev. He’s now the guy who beat Chimaev, and those are two very different price tags. The moment a champion has the most leverage is before the next fight is signed, and the Imavov bout is sitting right there in negotiations. A former champ who has sat at that same table just co-signed Strickland using every ounce of it.
