Tito Ortiz, BJ Penn and more: 5 UFC champions who had contract disputes with the promotion

Right now, the future of UFC heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou is in doubt. ‘The Predator’ is embroiled in a contract dispute with the promotion and it feels unlikely that he’ll return to action.

Francis Ngannou isn’t the first champion to end up in a contract dispute with the UFC. At times, we’ve even seen titleholders leave after failing to come to terms with the promotion.

Whether Ngannou ends up departing the promotion or coming to an agreement with Dana White and company remains to be seen. Given how different the outcomes were for some of his predecessors, it’s very hard to say.

Here are five UFC champions who got into contract disputes with the promotion.

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#5. Jens Pulver – former UFC lightweight champion

Jens Pulver left his lightweight title behind after a contract dispute

One of the first UFC champions to clash with the promotion was inaugural lightweight titleholder Jens Pulver. He left the promotion under a black cloud in 2002, leaving behind his title in the process.

Pulver had fought on a handful of occasions in the octagon before he claimed the first 155-pound title in early 2001, outpointing Caol Uno. With knockout power and plenty of charisma, it felt like ‘Little Evil’ could become a poster-boy for the promotion’s new owners, Zuffa.

Pulver received a solid marketing push from them, even becoming the first lightweight to headline a pay-per-view when he beat BJ Penn in his second title defense. However, he didn’t quite catch on as a mainstream star, and that put him at odds with Dana White and company when it came to his pay.

According to his manager Monte Cox, because he signed a contract before many of his rivals, ‘Lil Evil’ ended up being paid less than the likes of Penn and Uno despite beating them. Despite this, White simply refused to renegotiate, despite Pulver’s status as a champion.

As the contract ran down, then, Pulver and his team simply sat tight, somehow managing to avoid an option that the promotion had of extending his terms.

Eventually, when he was contacted by matchmaker Joe Silva, Pulver refused the terms offered and ended up departing the promotion. This meant giving up his title, but due to the way he’d been treated, he didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he was even pictured dumping the belt in a garbage can.

Pulver would eventually return to the fold some four years later, but he remains one of the few champions to stand up to the UFC’s power-brokers.

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#4. Murilo Bustamante – former UFC middleweight champion

Murilo Bustamante left the UFC for PRIDE after a contract dispute

Back in 2002, Jens Pulver wasn’t the only UFC champion to become embroiled in a contract dispute with the promotion and lose his title in the process. In an almost identical situation, the same thing happened to middleweight champion Murilo Bustamante later that year.

Initially competing in the octagon as a light heavyweight, Bustamante dropped to 185 pounds in early 2002 and quickly became a revelation there.

He knocked out inaugural middleweight champion Dave Menne to claim the title in January and then stunned fans by submitting Olympic silver medallist Matt Lindland in his first title defense a few months later.

However, the fight with Lindland was the final one on the Brazilian’s contract, an oversight on the part of Dana White and company. When Bustamante came out on top, he quickly found himself at an impasse.

The promotion did offer him a new deal, but feeling he deserved more, he decided to look around on the free market, hoping for an offer from PRIDE. At the time, the Japanese promotion was the world’s biggest.

When PRIDE didn’t offer him terms, though, he went back to White, only to find that the offer on the table had been decreased. Naturally, Bustamante didn’t accept and departed the promotion there and then, signing with PRIDE in 2003.

In an interview in 2020, Bustamante spoke about his contract dispute with the UFC, stating that he felt like White and company had “placed their bets on Matt Lindland, and it backfired.”

He also claimed that while White had been cordial to him over the years, he still felt some “sour grapes” over the dispute, something that wouldn’t be surprising given the promotion lost a great champion.

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#3. BJ Penn – former UFC welterweight and lightweight champion

BJ Penn was the last example of an active champion who abandoned their title to move elsewhere

If Francis Ngannou does decide to leave the UFC when his contract expires in early 2023, he’ll become the first reigning champion to abandon his title since BJ Penn in 2004. It’s a situation that the promotion has been desperate to avoid ever since.

Penn stunned everyone at the first event of that year by submitting longtime champion Matt Hughes to claim welterweight gold. Remarkably, it was the first time that the Hawaiian had ever fought at 170 pounds.

It felt like he had plenty of options going forward, including a huge rematch with Hughes. But there was one issue: the title bout had been the final one of Penn’s contract.

Rather than re-sign with Dana White and company, then, ‘The Prodigy’ decided to explore free agency and was quickly offered a huge deal by Japanese promotion K-1.

According to Penn in a 2010 interview, K-1’s offer was five times more than the one that the UFC had made to him – but he’d have been willing to stay in the octagon for a third of that amount.

Unfortunately, White wasn’t willing to budge on his initial offer. So, with things at an impasse, Penn decided to go with K-1.

Incredibly, according to the Hawaiian, the decision sent White ballistic. He apparently called Penn and told him he’d never be welcome back in the promotion, even going as far as to threaten to remove his fight with Hughes from any future DVD releases.

Eventually, cooler heads did prevail, and ‘The Prodigy’ returned to the fold just over a year after leaving. However, while his relationship with White was repaired, he never regained the welterweight title he abandoned following his contract dispute.

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#2. Tito Ortiz – former UFC light heavyweight champion

Tito Ortiz was welcomed back into the fold after his contract dispute

While the previous three champions on this list all ended up leaving the UFC and abandoning their titles, cooler heads prevailed when Tito Ortiz ended up in a contract dispute with the promotion in 2003.

The then-light heavyweight champion eventually came to terms with Dana White and company, and was welcomed back into the fold. However, it wasn’t the first clash that ‘The Huntington Beach Bad Boy’ would have with the promotion, and it almost acted as a precursor to their later issues.

Like many of their later clashes, Ortiz and the promotion butted heads in 2003 over money. Essentially, after drawing Zuffa’s first big pay-per-view buyrate in his bout with Ken Shamrock, ‘The Huntington Beach Bad Boy’ felt like he deserved a bigger slice of the pie.

This feeling was only magnified by the fact that the next fighter to challenge him was supposed to be Chuck Liddell, a friend and former training partner of Ortiz.

For his part, Liddell seemed more than happy to face Ortiz for the title, seeing him as merely an acquaintance. ‘The Huntington Beach Bad Boy’ clearly didn’t agree with that.

In the end, Ortiz and White simply couldn’t come to an agreement for a potential fight with Liddell, and so the champ spent nearly an entire year on the shelf.

Eventually, the promotion tired of negotiating with Ortiz, and decided to crown an interim light heavyweight champion in his absence. In a big upset, that interim champion turned out to be Randy Couture and not Liddell, as ‘The Iceman’ was beaten handily by the ageing former heavyweight titleholder.

With Liddell out of the picture, of course, the negotiations between Ortiz and the UFC quickly thawed, breaking the impasse. Just months after Couture’s interim title win, ‘The Huntington Beach Bad Boy’ returned to face him in a unification bout. Remarkably, ‘The Natural’ beat him, rendering the whole contract dispute largely pointless.

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#1. Randy Couture – former UFC heavyweight champion

Randy Couture (second from left) had the biggest contract dispute with the UFC to date

Back in early 2007, the idea that Randy Couture was anything but one of the UFC’s most loyal fighters seemed laughable.

‘The Natural’ had held the heavyweight title when Zuffa bought the promotion out in 2001, but despite losing his crown a year later, he wasn’t discarded by Dana White and company.

Instead, he was handed an immediate title shot at 205 pounds and ended up shocking everyone by upsetting both Chuck Liddell and Tito Ortiz at the age of 40 to become undisputed light heavyweight champion.

Couture retired in 2006 after losing that title to Liddell in a rematch, but it didn’t take long for the UFC to turn to him once again when they needed a heavyweight title challenger a year later.

Despite not fighting in the weight class for four years, ‘The Natural’ was handed a shot at champion Tim Sylvia. He beat him easily to start his third reign with the title.

However, after he defeated Gabriel Gonzaga in a title defense, things quickly went south. Just months later, Couture abruptly “resigned” from the UFC, claiming he was “tired of swimming upstream” against the promotion.

It later emerged that Couture was angry with the promotion for failing to sign top-ranked heavyweight Fedor Emelianenko. He also had issues with his pay, which was seemingly too low for his liking.

This led to over a year of contract disputes between the two parties, with both sides blaming the other for the mess that had been caused and numerous lawsuits being filed. Quite which side was in the wrong is still up for debate well over a decade later.

Thankfully for everyone, before the situation got too nasty, the impasse was broken. Couture agreed to return to the fold – with a bigger contract – and was welcomed back with open arms by White and company. This, though, remains probably the biggest contract dispute in UFC history.