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Eddie Alvarez is one of the best MMA free agents out there as of today, and when Dana White said the situation was going to ‘get ugly,’ he wasn’t kidding, but no way did he know what was going to happen next. Eddie Alvarez said Bellator did not offer a fair match to the UFC’s contract offer and is now actually suing the lightweight fighter instead.
“We don’t believe [the UFC contract offer] was matched at all,” said Alvarez. “I want to give details, but we’re in the middle of a lawsuit…We went to a settlement meeting maybe a couple days ago…and I was sued 30 minutes after that meeting was over. So there’s some tension in the air. I’m trying not to get too frustrated in the meantime.”
It was previously reported that Bellator matched the UFC’s offer, but Alvarez indicated that the terms were not actually comparable. Alvarez, who said he was not allowed to discuss the details or terms of either contract offer, compared the situation to a dinner date:
“It’s like one guy has the intention to take me to a fine restaurant and eat lobster, and the other guy wants to take me to McDonald’s. The second guy thinks dinner is dinner. But the two things are very different…A match in my book is if one promotion pays me $10, then the other promotion would pay me $10. But that’s not what happened.”
When is a matching offer not a matching offer? The way Rebney told it, Bellator didn’t just offer Alvarez a comparable deal, it offered him identical wording on an identical contract.
“As a matter of fact,” Rebney told MMAjunkie.com , “We didn’t just match it, we took the UFC contract, took it out of the PDF format, changed the UFC name to the Bellator name, and put a signature to it.”
If Alvarez would have signed the contract, Bellator CEO Bjorn Rebney added, Bellator would have sent him a check for $250,000 the next day to match the signing bonus the UFC had offered him. It would also have given him $70,000 to show and another $70,000 to win in his first fight, just like the UFC.
Now Alvarez is being sued and seems very confused about the whole ordeal. The former Bellator lightweight champion expressed confusion over the nature of the lawsuit, though he had a clear opinion on such a lawsuit’s merits.
“I’m not 100 percent sure what the lawsuit is for,” Alvarez said. “To us, it’s pretty plain and simple. If this goes before anybody in court, they’re going to see really fast that this is not a match.”
Alvarez said he did not know what the next steps might be or what the time frame for a resolution might look like. Alvarez said he would continue to train in the meantime.
“I’m disappointed,” he said. “I gave a lot of my life to Bellator, and I’ve let them know how I feel, and I don’t get much back in return…It’s awful.”
Final Thought:
Alvarez belongs in the UFC and I’m very disappointed how Bellator is handling this whole situation. I feel the relationship between Bellator and Alvarez is over whether they keep him or not.