Reebok has a couple of snafu's going at the moment. The first is this t-shirt. Apparently Reebok doesn't recognize Northern Ireland. Conor McGregor's coach John Kavanaugh is furious and has threatened to stop the Reebok endorsement deal his gym has unless Reebok pulls the shirt off their site. Overreaction? Probably. Rarely see Alaska and Hawaii on commercialized/symbolic USA shapes. The second is that Reebok has stopped selling over 100 UFC 'Fight Kits' on their website. Fight Kits are personalized fighter uniforms with names/flags/colours of fighters on them. Reebok and the UFC have a profit sharing model where personalized items have a direct kickback to the fighter. Apparently they went from having 140 or so available on the website (for an outrageous price) to eight. Not even every UFC champion is on there, now. I don't know how many of you rushed out and bought a Nik Lentz jersey for $80 so it's possible that the majority of the product wasn't selling-- concerning since this was supposedly part of the deal. The athletes had virtually no say in the design of the clothing and can't do much about moving the product if it looks generic and costs too much.
with some fighters literally quitting MMA to go earn more money elsewhere because of this deal and now this... gotta wonder if this may be a legit crack in the UFC's dominance of the MMA world. Can Belator capitalise on this? We could be headed towards a boxing like split world of MMA where no org is truly #1 and the top fighters are spread out (once again) amongst different orgs if this Reebok deal is such utter crap that it continues to affect fighters ability to earn beyond their fight purses.
