Talk of a boxing match between boxing legend Floyd Mayweather Jr and UFC superstar Conor McGregor just refuses to die off.
The latest wrinkle in the story comes from Mayweather, who revealed the fight purse he’d offered McGregor in order to fight him in the boxing ring during an interview on ESPN.
“We tried to make the Conor McGregor fight,” Mayweather said on the ‘First Take’ show. “They know what my number is. My number was a guaranteed $100 million. That was my number. We’re the A-side. I don’t really know how much money Conor McGregor has made. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t even made $10 million in an MMA bout. We are willing to give him $15 million and then we could talk about splitting the percentage, the back-end percentage on pay-per-view.”
McGregor earned a guaranteed $3.5 million for his last fight at UFC 205, a second round TKO victory over Eddie Alvarez to win the lightweight title and become a two division champion, and his cut of the 1 million+ PPV sales will have earned him substantially more.
Earlier in the year, McGregor had boasted that he expecting to earn in the region of $40 million in total over the course of 2016 and he was estimated to have banked around $22 million the year before that.
With that in mind he can afford to play it cool in regard to Mayweather’s offer, and he’s previously indicated that he would want $100 million to fight him.
The massive elephant in the room continues to be the fact that McGregor is still under contract with the UFC, but the boxer still hopes that there’s a way to get the deal done.
“Conor McGregor keep telling everyone he want the fight. Let’s make it happen,” Mayweather said. “He keeps blowing smoke up everybody’s ass. Dana White, the UFC, let’s make it happen. Bring him over to the boxing world, and I’ll show him what it’s like.”
