Select Answers: Ortiz, UFC Pay, WWE Top Seller

Welcome to Select Answers, a short feature that provides some of the answers to questions that were posed to Sean Ross Sapp in the most recent Fightful Weekly Q&A Podcast. The show drops every week on Fightful Select for subscribers.

When aggregating these posts please refer to it as "Fightful Select Answers Q&A" and tag Fightful, noting that it was in the Q&A format to avoid confusion.

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Is the WWE Shop Top Seller filter accurate for showing the current top selling merch? People use this to prop their favorite wrestlers up a lot but some have said it’s inaccurate information.

When I've got access to the charts via internal Fanatics info, or those presented within WWE, very rarely do they match up with that section as it is presented on the website. "Very rarely" might be generous. I don't think it ever has. There was a note we got recently about the Nightmare Collection (windbreaker) briefly crashing WWE Shop's site.

Whatever happened to Ortiz? Is he still with AEW? Is he injured?

Ortiz is still with AEW. He was injured, but the last time I checked, he was cleared and just wasn't being used. He hasn't wrestled for AEW since January 2024, and before that hadn't wrestled since the Santana match, and before that, Stadium Stampede. He has wrestled three times in AEW in the last two years but is still getting paid. He's done a few indies in the last few months.

How can the UFC justify keeping their bonuses at $50,000 in 2025 when the company is worth over $11 billion? This is the same bonus amount paid at UFC 79 … in 2007, when the UFC was worth ~$1 billion. Based on inflation alone, it should at least be $75,000, which seems way low considering the growth of the company.

They can't justify it, which is why Cung Le and other UFC fighters successfully sued them. The UFC has long been a disproportionate entity when it comes to fighter pay and reimbursement compared to revenue.