Cosmo Alexandre squashes beef with ONE Championship; will sign new deal this week

Sometimes walking away from the negotiating table in MMA does prove effective. After airing his grievances with ONE Championship in public last week, Cosmo Alexandre told SCMP MMA’s Post Fight Podcast he is set to sign a new deal with the Asian martial arts promotion. “It’s simple, if they don’t want to make a deal just let me go,” the 38-year-old Brazilian, who has not fought since a spectacular 29-second KO of former UFC star Sage Northcutt in May 2019, had posted on social media. But “Good Boy” said he has now reached an agreement with ONE after fresh talks with CEO Chatri Sityodtong and senior vice-president Matt Hume at the weekend. “Last Saturday I talked to Chatri, I had a meeting with him, it was kind of a good talk,” Alexandre said. “I see the problem is the company is growing fast and it’s really big now, it’s huge. So sometimes it’s hard to talk straight to him, so he tried to fix my situation. “Of course, it’s about money, about my purse, and we got a deal now, but I’m just waiting to sign the contract. I’m waiting for them to send it to me. I was one year without a fight because I didn’t want to fight for the same purse, my contract wasn’t good. We are trying to fix that.” ONE Championship job cuts ‘hurt my heart’, says Aung La After the Northcutt fight, Alexandre signed with First Round Management’s Malki Kawa to help him negotiate a better deal (he had never had a manager before). The agent manages UFC superstars Jon Jones and Jorge Masvidal, who have also been hitting out about fighter pay, and they were introduced by Alexandre’s wrestling coach at Evolution MMA in Florida, who is a mutual fried. “I fought Sage and I won, and of course I tried to get a new deal,” he said. “They [ONE] didn’t want to do a new deal.” “Everybody was saying, ‘You should go to UFC’,” he added. “Man, I don’t need to go to UFC. If it’s good for me and my family I would go. But if ONE makes a good deal and pays me fair, I can stay too. I don’t care about where to fight, I just want to make fair money and that’s it.” Alexandre said he felt hard done by, because he had agreed to fight former ONE lightweight kick-boxing champ Nieky Holzken in November 2018, even though he knew he would be physically compromised by the weight cut. He suffered the first knockout loss of his career, only taking the fight because “I had no money, no job for five or six months”, despite being promised a fight at welterweight after beating Elliot Compton at 77kg on his debut in ONE. “What happened with my last fight against Nieky was bad, and now I just beat Sage, so I needed a manager, I needed to start making some money,” he said. “I showed him [Kawa] my contract and said I need help. I still want to fight at a high level but not for four or five years. I wanna make my money now and relax a little bit with my family.” Alexandre (8-1) said he was then offered the chance to fight former UFC star Yushin Okami (36-14) at ONE: Century in Tokyo last October, but “we started fighting from there”. Okami fought on the card and beat former ONE welterweight title contender Agilan Thani (11-4). And do you know what kills me? See @yodchatri and @ONEChampionship posting about how they "respect" the fighters ,how One Championship is different from other shows and bla bla bla. BS! It's simple bro, if they don't want to make a new deal, just let me go ! https://t.co/ienule6IA4 — Cosmo Alexandre (@CosmoAlexandre) June 14, 2020 “I told them that didn’t make sense,” Alexandre said. “Okami was coming from three losses, he would make his last fight in Tokyo and then retire, so it’s not good for me. I knew if I didn’t put him down, I would lose the fight. That’s the truth. If at least they pay me better, of course I would fight.” An olive branch was extended by Chatri in April, but things turned sour again, and that’s when Alexandre turned to Twitter to make his voice heard. “When I talked to Chatri two months ago, he said he didn’t know about that, the history. He said, ‘Sorry Cosmo, I feel so bad. You need to understand I have more than 100 fighters and I can’t follow closely what happens with every single fighter’. We talked for hours, and then when we hung up the phone. “I was like, ‘OK, he will fix the situation’ but he didn’t, so after almost two months I started talking on the internet to see what would happen. And last Saturday Chatri called me with my manager and Matt Hume and we talked long, it’s not easy, you know how it works. But in the end everything was good and now I’m just waiting for the contract.”