Report: UFC Passed on Brock Lesnar’s Latest Asking Price, Following PPV Move to ESPN+

The MMA world is still buzzing over Dana White’s recent claim Brock Lesnar is done fighting, and now a new interesting, wrinkle to that story could be emerging.

Ever since Daniel Cormier took out Stipe Miocic last July to become the UFC’s heavyweight champ, it’s been clear the promotion was hoping to have Lesnar fight “DC”. But, earlier this week White turned heads by claiming that Lesnar had told him he’s “done fighting”. As a result, the UFC’s working on having Cormier – Miocic 2 go down on August 17th.

The news surprised some folks, however, due to the fact Lesnar had reportedly returned to the USADA testing pool a while back. More recently, MMA writer Seán Sheehan cited veteran MMA journalist, Dave Meltzer, in reporting this:

On the latest Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer says Brock Lesnar wanted a flat fee for his next UFC fight due to UFC pay-per-view now being online only. Dave says the number was deemed too high & turned down by the UFC.

Now, if you’re not in the U.S., and don’t follow MMA religiously, you may not know that the UFC recently moved its PPV cards there to ESPN+. This means that people need to be subscribed to the streaming service in order to purchase a PPV card. The theory has been this will drop PPV buys, at least for the short term, since not everyone is signed up to the service (and not everyone wants to use streaming services to watch fight cards). Thus, fighters, like Lesnar, might want more money up front, since there’s expected to be less PPV buys and less royalties available for fighters.

It will be interesting to see if White or Lesnar come out and deny the above happened or played a role in his decision to walk away from fighting. More to come?