Conor McGregor’s last visit to the Octagon at UFC 257 back in January may have been something of a disaster after he lost his trilogy fight with Dustin Poirier due to breaking his leg in the first round, but financially it proved to be a huge success.
The UFC normally keeps it’s lips tightly shut about the exact amount of pay-per-view buys it’s events get, but McGregor had other ideas yesterday when he took a photo of his official royalty statement to prove that the event had been amongst the biggest in the history of the promotion.
The statement shows that the event was projected to do 1,500,238 pay-per-view buys, but ultimately slightly outpaced that by doing ‘collected reported buys’ of 1,504,737.
It should be noted that projections from the media just days after the event about the PPV buy were actually slightly above that, claiming in the region of 1.6 million buys, so McGregor’s official numbers aren’t overly surprising, but do suggest that the projections we’re normally accustomed to hearing from the likes of the Sports Business Journal or Wrestling Observer are broadly accurate.
When it was pointed out by fellow fighter Cody Durden that McGregor’s last outing will have generated the UFC over $100 million in one night, McGregor suggested that this was far from the first time that was the case, while also suggesting that he’d added much more than that to the company’s overall value.
“A multitude of times, leading to a $4.2bn dollar acquisition of the company in 2016,” McGregor responded. “Then I went a multitude more, perching the company up to an almost $11bn valuation, where it sits now in today’s market. Incredible!”
As impressive as his UFC 257 PPV haul was, it still pales in comparison to McGregor’s biggest fight against Khabib Nurmagomedov in 2019, which drew a whopping 2.4 million buys, which remains the UFC’s all-time high so far.
