In news that should be no big suprise to anyone, rumors stemming for the UK tabloids yesterday that Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather Jr were on the verge of announcing a fight in the boxing ring appear to be completely unfounded.
“It’s not true; it’s just a tabloid story,” Dana White told Yahoo! Sports. “And as far as I knew, Floyd is retired and he’s been on a world-wide vacation and hasn’t even been thinking of fighting.”
In the UK, the tabloids are no strangers to creating weird and wonderful stories out of thin air in order to sell newspapers, and that appears to have been the case here.
As we stated yesterday when the news first broke, given the fact that McGregor is currently under contract with the UFC, there’s no way the UFC would have allowed their biggest star to just randomly take on his first ever professional boxing bout against one of the best of all-time.
The fact that McGregor was only alleged to have been offered £7 million to fight was another red flag, given that he was almost guaranteed that much in the UFC, let alone a blockbuster boxing fight with “Money” Mayweather.
Meanwhile, veteran MMA journalist Jeremy Botter has claimed on Twitter that negotiations for the Irishman’s return to the Octagon are well underway, stating that it’s “99% done for the UFC 202 main event on August 20th.”
That’s a much more plausible rumor, falling right in line with when Dana White had indicated he’d like to see the star return.
At this stage it remains to be seen who his opponent will be though. A rematch with Nate Diaz is still not out of the question, though a defense of his featherweight title against the winner of UFC 200’s Jose Aldo Vs Frankie Edgar interim title bout is also a possibility.
The latter option is the one that White has indicated he wants to see, but that would mean a fairly quick turnaround of just six weeks for the winner, and would gamble on the fact that they emerge from UFC 200 relatively unscathed.
