Former undisputed heavyweight champion Mike Tyson is a big fan of mixed martial arts, but he does not expect their combatants to catch up to boxers in terms of pay.

There are countless boxers who earn significantly more money than most of the main event fighters in UFC.

Outside of their company superstar Conor McGregor, very few fighters cross over the seven figure mark in terms of base pay.

Even McGregor earned his largest payday, by far, when he crossed over to boxing to face Floyd Mayweather in August 2017. Their pay-per-view brought in the second highest buyrate in combat sports with over 4 million purchases.

Outside of McGregor, most UFC fighters can only dream of making millions of dollars per fight. McGregor's last opponent, popular UFC veteran Donald Cerrone, earned a base purse of $200,000.

McGregor's massive payday against Mayweather has influenced numerous UFC fighters to openly challenge boxers to cross-sport showdowns.

Despite doing well on pay-per-view and selling out certain arenas, there pay scale between boxing and MMA is very far apart.

Tyson has no idea why the pay scale is so wide between the two sports, but the UFC's near monopoly on the industry has a stranglehold on a lot of fighters who demand more money.

"MMA will always have more views and stuff than boxing, but boxers will always make more money than MMA fighters,' he told Brant James.

"That's tricky [on why they don't make more money than what they make], it doesn't make any sense. I don't know, they don't make enough money in my perspective. It's exciting and sexy, but [UFC fighters] don't make enough money."