When we talk about the greatest featherweight mixed martial artists of all time, the name Jose Aldo comes to mind. With a record of 29-7, he has fought in promotions across 2 continents and went undefeated for 18 fights streak across a decade from 2005 to 2015.
Jose was the king of the UFC light featherweight division for years. Beating fighters such as Ricardo Lamas, Chan Sung, Frankie Edgar, Chad Mendes.
With 7 successful title defenses in a time frame of 2011-2014, he is 4th in line for the most successful title defenses in UFC promotion and most in the featherweight division. Which certainly gives Junior all the rights to claim that he is one of the greatest fighters to grace the UFC octagon.
Being one of the best featherweights in the world the fighter has earned over 5 million bucks. So let’s take a look at Junior’s significant fight purses throughout his UFC career.
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Career Earnings of UFC legend Jose Aldo
Jose Aldo started his career at WEC where he earned only $6000 in his first fight. After WEC merged with UFC in 2010 the promotion promoted Jose to the champion of UFC featherweight division from its WEC counterpart.
Aldo raked in a huge amount of $757,000 for the first time in his career. He beat Mark Hominick to defend his belt at UFC 129. Following the win, he went on to beat Kenny Florian where he earned $132,000, and $106,000 with Chad Mendes.
After beating Chad his career only went up the hill. He earned a fantastic figure of $1,410,000 only in 4 fights defeating high-profile players like Frankie Edgar, Chan Sung Jung, Ricardo Lamas, and Mendes again. Which would make him defend his featherweight belt 7 times in a row.
Then came the turning point. Jose Aldo vs Conor McGregor UFC 194. The Notorious beat Jose to become the only 2 division champion in the promotion. Though Junior’s 13 sec KO loss against Conor Mcgregor was the biggest loss of his career the bout was never a monetary loss for him. He grabbed a handsome amount of $2,540,000 after the loss.
He was aware of his fan following and popularity and started to appear only in highly anticipated fights. The loss against Conor didn’t affect his future earnings. He then went on to earn $1,055,833 from the interim title bout against Edgar at UFC 200.
However, he was unable to defend his title or regain his title against Max Holloway, making him lose 2 consecutive fights. But, he managed to earn $490,000 and $260,000 from both the fights respectively.
The former featherweight champion would then go on to win two back-to-back performances of the night against Jeremy Stephens and Renato Moicano. But, after losing to Alexander Volkanovski he decided to leave the division and compete in bantamweight.
However, things didn’t go his way in the bantamweight division as well. Aldo was defeated in his bantamweight debut by Marlon Moraes where Jose earned $420,000( $400000 for showing up and $20,000 for sponsorship). But, the loss didn’t restrain him from getting paid in 6 figures. Jose went on to fight Petr Yan for the interim bantamweight title. He was expected to lose the title bout as Petr was dominating the division then and rightfully so. Yan gave Junior perhaps his most brutal career defeat at UFC 251. Yet Again, he earned $430,000 only for showing up in that bout.
Jose’s most recent bout was against Marlon “Chitto” Vera where Aldo won via decision. He earned $415,000 of the win.
Aldo is currently ranked #5 amongst the bantamweight fighters in the promotion. From getting paid only $6000 a fight to earning $2,540,000 he has seen it all. Junior is all set to fight at the co-main of UFC 265 with Pedro Munhoz.
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