The next opponent for UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor is still up in the air. It appears that we are down two a few fighters that will likely get the next chance at McGregor, who won the title last year at UFC 205 from Eddie Alvarez.
McGregor took an extended hiatus to celebrate the birth of his first child and then got his super fight with boxing legend Floyd Mayweather granted. On the flip side, Tony Ferguson did the same thing he’d been doing all along, which is winning fights and calling out the champion.
Now that he’s the interim lightweight champion, it appears that Ferguson’s trash talk might just be getting him somewhere.
However, you can’t count out a trilogy fight with Nate Diaz. The feeling was that McGregor’s return to MMA will be against Diaz due to the fact that it’s the most lucrative fight possible to make right now.
During the most recent Fight Companion edition of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the longtime UFC commentator speculated on who McGregor would fight next. Rogan believes that Ferguson is the “logical” fight and that he seemed to be next for McGregor.
“Conor made that post to Tony,” Rogan said (transcript courtesy of MMA Fighting). “He made an Instagram post. Grand Theft Auto with him holding a gun, driving a boat. Conor’s smart. He realizes that Tony’s an unusual, eccentric character. Conor’s an unusual, eccentric character, Tony’s an unusual, eccentric character too and Tony has the longest win streak in the UFC’s 155-pound division. He’s the interim champion and he’s the logical fight. He’s a bad motherf**ker, no doubt, and a legitimate champion.
“Conor sells like f**king crazy and Conor versus Tony sells because Tony’s a legit threat. Conor versus a legit threat sells. Conor fighting someone sells but Conor versus a legit threat is where it gets interesting.”
Make no mistake about it, McGregor is the biggest star in history of MMA due to the fact that his last four MMA fights have all topped 1 million buys and his boxing match against Mayweather which sold over 4 million buys. A fight against Diaz would bring in the most cash.
UFC 196, which saw Diaz defeat McGregor on short notice via submission, drew an estimated 1,317,000 buys, 17,000 more than McGregor’s history-making fight against Alvarez at UFC 205 which only sold 1,300,000 buys. Ferguson’s fight with Lee is estimated to have drawn an estimated 120,000 buys.
“The whole world doesn’t know Tony but the MMA world knows Tony, for sure. But the regular people are the people you really need to get ahold of to buy pay-per-views. [Nate] is the money [fight]. . . [But] Nate made four million bucks over two fights and he don’t give a f**k.
He’s like, ‘Pay Me.’ He beat Conor and in the second fight he arguably had a draw with Conor. He lost a decision based on a couple people’s opinion. Public opinion means a lot and if you went online and asked people who you think won that fight, I bet you would get very close to 50/50 Nate versus Conor. . .
“Those guys are rivals man and Nate choked him the f**k out in the first fight. That’s always gonna be there. . . The big money would be the Nate Diaz fight even if Nate beat him in the second fight.
“You think you can go to the gas station right now and go, ‘Hey man, who’s Tony Ferguson?’ If you go to the average person and ask them who Nate Diaz is, way more people are gonna know who he is than Tony.”
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