Dana White says the deals with the UFC and the Nelk Boys worked well for Hasbulla last year.
Hasbulla first rose to prominence through his work in a number of viral videos, but became a fixture in the MMA world after he began making appearances with the former UFC lightweight champion. , Khabib Nurmagomedov, and other fighters from his team. The attention the 21-year-old began to garner from MMA fans soon caught the eye of the UFC, which in 2022 signed him to a five-year contract that included the sale of merchandise to his effigy and its integration as a playable character in EA Sports UFC 4.
Dana White is generous
The social media sensation recently appeared on the Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson podcast, and when Hasbulla was mentioned on another episode of the show with Dana White, the UFC president opened up about how much his recent contracts have been lucrative.
“He’s a wonderful kid. The Nelk Boys actually have it and they didn’t blow it up, it was already exposed,” White said. “They took really good care of him. When he came here they took him on tour and did a lot of good things for him. But Hasbulla did really well, I mean we made a deal with him for the video game, we made a deal with him for the T-shirts where he made a lot of money… Just with us and the Nelk Boys, he easily won over a million dollars, so yeah. He’s tearing everything up.”
White’s friendship with the social media personalities Nelk Boys is also well documented, but given recent developments around the UFC and fighter compensation, the timing of revealing how much money the promotion gives to someone who isn’t even on the team might be a bit of a misnomer.
The UFC president already made headlines earlier this week when he defended the decision not to pay Stephen “Wonderboy” Thompson after he made weight to fight at UFC 291, and now a long-running class action lawsuit against the UFC is otherwise poised to go to court and force the promotion to defend a number of its business practices.
