Michael Page is out of the UFC, and he’s done being diplomatic about it. Speaking on the Fight Your Corner podcast, the 39-year-old Englishman said the promotion underpays its fighters, asks them to take reckless risks for that money, and may have been quietly hoping he’d lose to Shara Magomedov.
He opened with the money.
“The facts are the facts. [UFC] don’t pay fighters enough. They don’t pay fighters well enough. Dana White just wants blood and guts all the time,” Page said.
His UFC run ended after UFC Paris in September. Page went 5-1 inside the octagon, picked up wins in two different weight classes and still didn’t get his contract renewed. The most recent stretch included a middleweight bout at UFC 319 at the United Center in Chicago on Aug. 16, 2025.
The knock on Page in the UFC was always style. Critics said he wasn’t aggressive enough and went to the scorecards too often. Social media wanted the flashy, highlight-reel knockouts he used to hand out in Bellator, and mostly didn’t get them.
Page’s response is that nobody was paying him to get flashy. In his telling, the risk of fighting with reckless abandon wasn’t worth what the UFC was offering. He said he’d have been open to changing his approach to please the matchmakers if the check had changed too.
“If you were paying them, even if they said to me, ‘We’re going to give you some more money, we want you to really push forward,’ fine. At least give me an option,” Page said.
He also took a swing at how the UFC sorts winners from losers. “This is the only sport where you could lose and move forward, and you could win and move backward,” he said, adding that this was probably the source of all the criticism aimed at him.
The Magomedov fight
The most interesting part of the interview was the Magomedov stuff. Page said beating Magomedov was the moment he understood his standing with the company had changed. He expected the win to open doors. When he went looking for his next fight, he said, he realized something was wrong, because the UFC had been hyping Magomedov so heavily.
“It made me question, ‘Maybe I was supposed to lose that fight,’” Page said. “And I don’t mean there’s anybody trying to rig it, but I think they were hoping I was going to lose. They could use my name to big up this kid they’re pushing, pushing, pushing.”
Page was explicit that he’s not alleging a fix. His read is that his name was booked as a stepping stone, he refused to be one, and the matchmaking cooled on him once he spoiled the plan.
My take: I’ll always respect a fighter who answers the question straight, and Page did that here, with names attached and no hedging. The pay argument is his strongest card. A guy who’s 5-1 and 39 years old is entitled to do the risk math on his own brain, and if the UFC wants him walking forward into fire, it can price that in. The Magomedov theory is harder to prove, and Page knows it, which is why he framed it as a hunch. Still, when a man goes 5-1, wins in two divisions and gets shown the door, he’s allowed to wonder out loud which of those wins the company actually wanted.
