The UFC featherweight champion has big plans for his future, and they involve beating new BMF champ Holloway and fighting McGregor in the home of Real Madrid FC.
New UFC featherweight champion Ilia Topuria is lining up his future opponents, and Alexander “The Great” Volkanovski is not included in the list.
Topuria took the belt off Volkanovski with a second round KO of the longstanding champion, and while a rematch was initially discussed, “El Matador” feels like he has bigger fish to fry now.
“I hope to defend the belt with Max Holloway, and then I wanna fight with Conor McGregor, hopefully,” Topuria told Sportskeeda in a new interview. “If [McGregor] wins his upcoming fight, that’s the fight I’m looking for. So hopefully it’s gonna happen.”
McGregor has his own fast-moving plans: he wants to cram three fights into 2024 to make up for lost time: the June 29th fight with Michael Chandler, a headline fight at the Sphere in September for Mexican Independence Day, and then a final bout in December.
Everyone seems to want onto that Sphere show except Topuria, who has a bigger building he wants to fill: the 80,000+ person Santiago Bernabeu Stadium in Spain.
“It’s gonna be the biggest fight in the in the MMA history,” Topuria said. “The biggest ticketing, the biggest pay-per-view, the biggest everything. We’re gonna have 80,000 people watching the fight in the arena. Yeah. It’s gonna be in the Bernabeu. When the UFC is gonna arrive in Spain, it’s gonna happen in Santiago Bernabeu Stadium.”
But first, Conor McGregor has to win his comeback fight at UFC 303. While “The Notorious” hasn’t been too complimentary towards Topuria, Ilia avoided burying the Irish sports star when sharing his prediction for June 29th.
“Conor, he’s he’s something special,” he said. “When he goes inside the cage, you never know. Maybe you see a knockout in 15 seconds, or maybe you see he breaks his leg, or someone knocks him out. So you never know. Something you always know is that you’re gonna see something spectacular in the fight. Something’s gonna happen.”
And if it happens that McGregor smashes Chandler, maybe it will set up a Topuria superfight in Spain for 2024 or 2025.