UFC Threatens Ban of TapouT For Fedor Emelianenko Sponsorship

[IC Champion]

http://www.5thround.com/41458/report...o-sponsorship/

The UFC’s hand is getting stronger and stronger as they apparently forced TapouT to back out of their one year, seven-figure sponsorship of Fedor Emelianenko.

To kick-off the agreement between the MMA clothing pioneer and the Russian heavyweight, TapouT created a shirt for Emelinaneko to wear for “Strikeforce: Fedor vs. Werdum” tonight.

“It was our understanding that the T-shirt was in production,” Fedor’s manager Vadim Finkelchstein told Sherdog.com Friday.

Instead, the clothing company called Fedor’s camp earlier this week and informed them that the deal was off.

“However, at the beginning of this week, we were told by our sponsorship representative that Tapout had received a call from (UFC President) Dana (White), which involved him saying that if Fedor signs a T-shirt deal with Tapout, then Tapout would be out of the UFC,” Finkelchstein explained.

According to M-1’s Global Director of Operations Evgeni Kogan, TapouT officials had assured them when the deal was being reached that there would be no issues with the UFC.

Unfortunately there WAS a problem and the deal went up in smoke as the threat of being banned by the UFC was too much for TapouT to lose.

“He’s used to these kind of fallouts from our friend Dana White, and to be honest, this didn’t come as a surprise (to him),” Finkelchstein said.

Emelianenko also lost out on another million-dollar sponsorship with clothing company RVCA after the UFC had threatened to ban them as well.