Sean Strickland came to Edmonton and left the city a one-star review.
On Thursday, Oct. 15, the former UFC middleweight champion went on X and summed up the city’s approach to addiction and homelessness in one line: “We love our drug addicts and hate our taxpayers...” He then addressed the local shopkeepers directly, telling them that after a lifetime of building something, the city was “gonna park 100 addicts in front of your shop to greet customers....” He closed with a policy pitch: “They should make the mayor live there for their term.”
That last line is funny. I laughed. It’s also the most Strickland sentence of a week packed with them, and that’s my problem with it.
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Strickland is at his best when he’s mad about something he can put a number on. The Edmonton post is him mad about something he can’t, and he’s doing it in the same week he has a far better fight going with the people who sign his checks.
The Week Sean Had
Consider the timeline. The fight week schedule making the rounds on X listed UFC Edmonton among the cards for Oct. 13 through Oct. 19, so Strickland was in town during one of the busier stretches on the calendar. He spent at least some of it with Anthony Hernandez. Championship Rounds reposted a clip from Strickland’s own account of the two of them walking through a park, with Strickland narrating that he was “Taking my Mexican friend to do white things.” You can read the rest of that caption yourself. It does not get more polished.
Meanwhile, the real story was already burning. Strickland has been loudly unhappy about his UFC pay, and on Wednesday Dana White answered him. “When isn’t Sean Strickland upset about something?” White said, per Championship Rounds. He added that “Sean Strickland just signed a new contract in May” and that “From what I hear, the number he’s putting out there is not true... It is what it is.”
Paulo Costa piled on from the fighter side Thursday. He quoted a post claiming Strickland had been fixated on Quinton Jackson’s payday against Chuck Liddell, and that same post floated a $400K/$400K figure for Strickland’s Imavov fight, which it said White claims was made up. Costa’s own take was that “UFC paid RAMPAGE 7 million to fight CHUCK,” then he set that against Raoni Barcelos and Raul Rosa Jr. going five rounds, which he said came with serious brain injuries and roughly $80,000 to $100,000 in pay. MMA Fighting even ran a mailbag asking whether Strickland can make a difference on fighter pay.
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That’s a live question. People in the sport are asking it. Costa, of all people, is backing him up with a dollar figure.
What the Post Gets Right, and What It Misses
I’ll give Strickland this much. He answers questions straight, including ones nobody asked, and his instinct here is a human one. Somebody who sank their savings into a storefront and watches customers walk past a sidewalk crisis has a gripe worth hearing. Making the mayor live there is a better bit than most of what passes for political commentary on X, and it has the bonus of being a concrete idea, even if it’s a joke.
The trouble is that it stops there. The post doesn’t name a policy. It doesn’t name a street, a business, or a shop owner. It doesn’t name the mayor. That figure of 100 addicts is a Strickland number, the kind you’d hear at a hotel bar at 1 a.m. from a guy who walked six blocks to find a Tim Hortons. Maybe he saw something that rattled him. The post doesn’t tell us what.
Compare that to the pay fight, where Strickland at least has a contract, a figure, and a boss publicly disputing it. That’s an argument with a paper trail. It has a counterparty who has to respond, and White already did. Every time Strickland wanders off to dunk on a city council, he hands White his best line for free. White’s crack about Strickland always being upset lands a lot harder when the answer, one day later, is a Canadian municipality.
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That’s how the UFC wins these fights. It doesn’t need to beat the argument. It only needs to file the guy making it in the drawer marked angry about everything, and Strickland keeps supplying the folders.
I like Strickland. I like fighters who say what they think with no publicist in the loop, and a sport full of guys reading prepared statements about how blessed they feel is worse than one with a Strickland in it. But a fighter’s outrage carries a limited budget of attention, even a fighter this loud, and he’s spending it on a city that will never hear about it while the company that actually controls his money gets a week off.
He signed a new deal in May, according to White. White says the number Strickland is quoting is wrong. That’s the sidewalk Strickland should be camped out on, every day, for the length of his term.
