Conor McGregor wants to make one thing very clear: He will absolutely fight again. And he wanted to do it sooner than you think.
The UFC lightweight champion wrote Thursday on Instagram that he offered to fight Frankie Edgar at UFC 222 on March 3 when Max Holloway pulled out of the scheduled featherweight title fight, but the UFC said “there wasn’t enough time to generate the money that the UFC would need.”
“I was excited about bouncing in last minute and taking out the final featherweight, without all the rest of the stuff that comes with this game,” McGregor wrote.
McGregor has not fought in the UFC since winning the lightweight belt from Eddie Alvarez at UFC 205 in November 2016. He fought Floyd Mayweather in a boxing match last August, earning upwards of $100 million and generating the second biggest pay-per-view mark of all time.
“The Notorious” said he will indeed be back in the Octagon.
“I am fighting again,” he wrote. “Period. I am the best at this.”
McGregor asked fans in the post to “respect the insane amount of work outside the fight game that I have put in.”
“On top of the fighting,” he wrote.
On Thursday, UFC president Dana White told TMZ that McGregor “understands” why the UFC 223 main event between Khabib Nurmagomedov and Tony Ferguson has to be for the real lightweight title, not the interim one. McGregor has yet to defend that 155-pound belt.
“Is he upset? No, Conor understands,” White said. “Conor made a lot of money, he wants some time off, but the division has to go on and the business has to go on.
“I say it all the time, when you get that kind of money… Conor might never come back. It’s a lot of money.”
The wildly popular Irishman, who is the biggest financial draw in the history of MMA, put the onus on the UFC to get him back in the cage in his Instagram post.
“I am here,” McGregor said. “It is on them to come and get me. Because I am here.”
