Vadim Nemkov had a door open to the UFC. He did the math, thought about a room full of broke-looking veterans, and stayed put in the PFL.
The PFL heavyweight champion (20-2, 1 NC) told Ushatayka this week that the UFC pays its fighters a fraction of what it should, and he didn’t bother with diplomatic phrasing. “The UFC is a huge money-making machine, so to speak,” Nemkov said. “There are massive sums involved, and the fighters get paid mere pennies.”
He’s right. And the way he said it is why it lands.
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The shirts
The best part of the interview has no numbers in it. Nemkov, without naming anyone, described being at a fight where a group of MMA veterans showed up. By his count, about half of them looked like ordinary working guys in worn-out shirts. He said it was very sad to see former UFC fighters who couldn’t find their way after retirement and were living meager lives.
That’s the part of the pay debate that never makes the press release. A purse figure is a number on a disclosure sheet. A former contender in a frayed shirt at the back of a venue is what that number looks like 10 years later.
“Those who put on the show, those who make the fights happen, they should be earning much more because of the heavy toll on their health,” Nemkov said.
That’s the whole argument in one sentence. The fighter supplies the product and absorbs the damage. Every camp, every fight, every clean shot to the head comes out of his account, and the account doesn’t refill. If the pay doesn’t cover the cost of the body, the job is a bad deal no matter how big the arena is.
The math, and the hedge
Nemkov said earning potential was the main reason he didn’t sign with the UFC, which MMA Mania noted had wanted him before he re-signed with the PFL. His numbers are a little loose. He said a fighter can, roughly speaking, earn twice as much in the PFL, then followed it with this: “If I fight here once, there I would have to fight three times.”
So is it double or triple? MMA Mania’s headline went with twice. Its roundup went with three times. Nemkov probably wasn’t reading off a spreadsheet.
I’ll give him credit for what he said in the clip FightLuck posted on X, though. Asked whether UFC fighters are underpaid, he opened with a caveat: “If the numbers being mentioned are accurate, then I really think so [UFC fighters being underpaid]. That’s definitely a problem.”
That’s a fighter answering a question straight and admitting he hasn’t seen the books. I’ll take that over a manager-approved non-answer every day of fight week.
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And the fuzziness barely matters. Pick either multiplier. If a heavyweight has to fight two or three times in the UFC to bank what one PFL fight pays him, that’s two or three camps, two or three chances at an injury, two or three nights of getting hit by large men. Heavyweight is the division where one punch rewrites a career. Asking those guys to triple their exposure for the same check is a strange business model to defend.
The fair pushback
Nemkov holds a PFL belt. He has every reason to make his employer look generous, and one champion’s contract tells you very little about what a PFL undercard fighter clears. MMA Mania’s framing, that the whole PFL roster earns twice as much, stretches what he actually described, which was his own situation and his own decision. Treat it as one elite fighter’s math.
But the pushback doesn’t touch his central point. He never claimed the PFL is a charity. He said the UFC makes huge money and the people taking the punches see too little of it.
He isn’t the only one saying it, either. The same night his comments circulated, MMA Mania’s roundup also featured Sean O’Malley telling people not to come to the UFC expecting to get rich: “It’s not gonna happen.” When a PFL champion and one of the UFC’s most recognizable names land on the same conclusion from opposite sides of the fence, the conclusion is probably correct.
Nemkov said he wants to be financially comfortable after he hangs up his gloves. That’s the bar. He wasn’t asking for a yacht. He wants to avoid ending up as one of the guys in the worn-out shirts, and he decided the UFC wasn’t the safest path there.
The PFL’s next heavyweight title fight headlines PFL Dubai on Saturday, Nov. 14, at 1 p.m. ET on the ESPN app. Whoever’s in it is getting paid more than he would for the same night in the Octagon, if Nemkov’s math holds.
