‘Why Is Conor Not Fighting?’
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Paul says the UFC is slow-playing McGregor’s contract in order to improve their position during upcoming media rights negotiations.
Jake Paul is shining a light on what he thinks has kept Conor McGregor out of the cage for so long despite the UFC superstar being healthy and ready to go since mid-2023.
We’re still waiting for UFC to announce a new date for Conor McGregor’s return fight. Currently, it’s been penciled in for UFC 310 on December 7th. But the promotion continues to be extremely shifty about locking McGregor in. UFC CEO Dana White regularly shoots down Mac return dates and even suggests Conor may never fight again.
So what’s going on? Why would the UFC continue to delay the return of their biggest superstar? In a new episode of Jake Paul’s BS podcast with special guest Francis Ngannou, “The Problem Child” shared his theory on the situation.
“For the people at home who don’t understand it, they’re like, ‘Why is Conor not fighting?’” Paul said. “So Conor has two fights left on his fight deal, but the UFC is trying to renew their [broadcast] rights deal because they license their content, which are the fights, to platforms. So they’re trying to renew their deal — they’re negotiating to let multiple people, but let’s say they’re gonna go with ESPN. They’re trying to renew the deal and get the most amount of money.”
“A part of that negotiation is, ‘Hey, we have Conor McGregor for two more fights.’ But if you were to fight now, that wouldn’t be a part of the negotiation. The company would be like, ‘Oh, well, you only have Conor for one fight.’ So that’s why Conor is not fighting right now.”
The UFC is set to start negotiating new broadcast deals at the start of 2025 in anticipation of their ESPN deal ending later in the year. Those deals will be worth billions with or without McGregor, but we don’t doubt he could sway the value of a package by hundreds of millions of dollars.
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But this could be a much simpler story we’ve seen many times before. In general, the UFC likes re-signing fighters before their contracts expire. And if you’re a big star like Francis Ngannou that has turned down a new contract, they’ll slow-play the remaining fights on your contract as much as possible.
“I feel like they were applying this financial pressure on me [by not booking me] because they know that I need to fight to make money to live,” Ngannou told Paul. “And then by not getting those fights, giving me excuses all the time, I will probably crawl back and say, ‘Okay, I take the contract and I take the money,’ or something like that.”
“I fought once for 20 seconds in the last 16 months,” Ngannou wrote on X (formerly Twitter) back in October 2020. Things wouldn’t get much better. He’d fight just once in 2021, and once in 2022.
Are there similar cut-throat business practices at play with Conor McGregor? “The Notorious” has definitely vented his frustration at return delays multiple times, and the promotion definitely could have gotten him back in the cage earlier if they really wanted to. Back during the pandemic lockdowns they admitted to shelving him because they’d lose too much money without a gate. So financial concerns have already resulted in us getting less Mac fights.
We’ll have to wait and see if his expected December return booking materializes. If it doesn’t, it certainly adds to the evidence that some behind-the-scenes business chicanery is at play.
