Sports Agent and Sports Lawyer Blog

Sports lawyers around the country are starting to take increasing notice of MMA. As MMA moves further into the mainstream and the amount of money at stake continues to soar, you may see more lawsuits such as the Fedor-Affliction Entertainment dispute currently raging in California.

This week the court denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss, which is not necessarily a harbinger of things to come, as the standard to survive a motion to dismiss is not a high threshold. Sherdog provides its usual expert analysis and summary of the sports lawsuit by attorney J.R. Riddell:

In the suit, the world’s No. 1-ranked heavyweight and M-1 claim that Affliction breached the “Fight Agreement” requirement to stage and promote a third bout for the fighter after advertised opponent Josh Barnett was refused a license in California for an alleged positive steroids test two weeks before the event. They claim that Affliction did not undertake “all reasonable efforts” to find a fighter to replace Barnett, and even go so far as to argue that Affliction lost interest in promoting the third bout partly because it was apparently pursuing a competing objective at the same time -- repairing its soured relationship with competing promoter, Zuffa LLC, parent company to the UFC. Shortly after Affliction’s decision to cancel the event, the UFC announced that it had reached a sponsorship agreement to allow the previously banned clothing brand back into its shows.