Tito Ortiz Officially Signs with Affliction

Big news within the MMA world tonight as Tito "The Huntington Beach Bad Boy" Ortiz has announced that he has officially signed with the Affliction promotion. Sports Illustrated (link below) got the scoop first, as Ortiz sat down for an interview with Arash Markazi.

According to the article, Ortiz is set to become the "highest-paid fighter in MMA history" as a result of his new contract with Affliction. According to industry sources, the deal was officially ironed out on Tuesday afternoon and will be announced at the Affliction press conference on Wednesday.

The contract is said to be "ground-breaking" and a "record" contract for a MMA fighter.

At the press conference on Wednesday, it is expected that Ortiz's first opponent will be named. It is widely expected that Renato "Babalu" Sobral will be announced as Ortiz's opponent at the October 11th show in Las Vegas. This show will be co-headlined by Arlovski vs Barnett.

Ortiz made some bold statements in his interview with Sports Illustrated. He claimed that with himself on an Affliction card, the promotion will be "guaranteed" to do over 500,000 PPV buys. There is no doubting Ortiz's popularity, especially amongst casual MMA fans, but it will be interesting to see whether his prediction comes true. There can be no doubt that the presence of Ortiz on the card will dramatically inflate the PPV counts, especially with Fedor pulling himself off the show due to an injured hand.

This is a big score for Affliction, although it will be interesting to hear how much money they shelled out to sign Ortiz. I imagine that he will receive a seven-figure fee for each fight, plus some potentially lucrative back-end bonuses based on the number of PPV buys for each event that he appears in. There was really no doubt that Ortiz was going to go anywhere else, especially given his cozy relationship with Donald Trump and the deep pockets that are backing the company. He sure as hell wasn't going to go back to the UFC, and EliteXC surely couldn't afford the dollars that Ortiz was asking for.

Affliction needs to leverage this (presumably) successful upcoming PPV in October into a TV deal on a major network. Trump used his contacts to sign a major MMA star, and now he needs to pull more strings to get the company a PPV deal. They can do all of the big PPVs that they want, but now the company has to start building brand awareness if they want to truly compete with the UFC. Signing Ortiz is definitely a good start.

Source: Tito Ortiz Signs with Affliction

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