Fast facts
- Division: Featherweight (also competed at lightweight and welterweight)
- Record: 11-10-1 with one no contest before The Ultimate Fighter; 2-5 in the UFC; 2-2 in bare-knuckle boxing
- Nationality: Irish-Russian
- Team/gym: SBG Ireland, Dublin
- Notable wins: Teruto Ishihara, Chris Avila, Rasul Shovhalov, Paulie Malignaggi, Jason Knight
Tuesdays and Thursdays. That is how Artem Lobov chose to start one of the angriest posts of his life. “I was at SBG every Tuesday and Thursday all these years, didn’t see him anywhere,” he wrote on X on Nov. 2, as MMA Fighting reported. The man he couldn’t find on the mats was Conor McGregor, his old training partner, and the post went on to make the darkest accusation of their long falling-out: that McGregor “sent people to burn my car and threaten my 60-year-old mother with a hammer.” Lobov closed that message, like most of the others he posted that week, with a note that it was all alleged.
To understand why a 40-year-old former featherweight would put that in public, you have to understand how much of his fighting life ran through that gym, and through that friendship.
The hard road in
Lobov, born August 11, 1986, turned pro in November 2010 with Cage Warriors and lost his debut to Patrick Vickers on the cards. He kept fighting on the British and European circuit, for Cage Warriors and Cage Contender, and by the time The Ultimate Fighter called he was 11-10-1 with one no contest. Records like that rarely get a television audition. They belong to the guys who take short-notice bouts and long drives, who fight up a weight or two (Lobov competed at lightweight and welterweight as well as his natural 145) because that’s where the opportunity is.
There were signs of more. At ACB 13 on January 31, 2015, he submitted Rasul Shovhalov in the second round. Then came the show.
On The Ultimate Fighter: Team McGregor vs. Team Faber, Lobov lost his preliminary bout to Mehdi Baghdad and should have been finished. Each coach was allowed to bring back one fighter who’d lost in the prelims, and McGregor, his coach and teammate, picked Lobov. He made it count. He stopped James Jenkins by TKO, did the same to Chris Gruetzemacher in the quarterfinals and knocked out Julian Erosa in the semis. The final was supposed to be against Saul Rogers, a fellow SBG product from the Manchester branch, until visa problems pulled Rogers out and Ryan Hall stepped in.
The UFC years
Hall beat him by unanimous decision at The Ultimate Fighter 22 Finale on December 11, 2015. Alex White beat him the same way at UFC Fight Night 82 in February 2016, and Lobov was reportedly negotiating with a regional promotion in Russia when the UFC offered a lifeline: newcomer Chris Avila at UFC 202. Lobov won a decision. He followed it with another over Teruto Ishihara at UFC Fight Night 99 in November 2016, 30-27, 30-27, 29-28.
Then the UFC handed him a main event. On April 22, 2017, at UFC Fight Night 108, he lost a unanimous decision to Cub Swanson, and both men took home Fight of the Night. For a fighter who’d entered the TUF house with double-digit losses, headlining against Swanson and earning a bonus doing it was a real thing, and it deserves better than the sidekick jokes that followed him around.
Andre Fili beat him on the cards that October. Then April 2018 happened. On April 3, Khabib Nurmagomedov and his entourage cornered Lobov and slapped him multiple times over comments Lobov had made about him. What followed became the Team SBG bus assault, and Lobov was pulled from his UFC 223 bout with Alex Caceres for his role in it. McGregor, per MMA Fighting, flew to Brooklyn to back him. Lobov has since said the trouble with Khabib started because he was defending McGregor’s honor.
His last UFC fight says something about him. Zubaira Tukhugov was removed from their October 2018 matchup over his part in the UFC 229 melee, and Michael Johnson came in and weighed 147, a pound over. Johnson forfeited 20% of his purse to Lobov. Lobov gave it back, then lost the decision. On January 29, 2019, he was reported released.
Bare knuckle
He signed a three-fight deal with Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship almost immediately, with a clause letting him keep fighting MMA. His style made sense there: he walks forward and throws a lot. He beat Jason Knight by unanimous decision in the BKFC 5 main event in April 2019, a fight that later won BKFC Fight of the Year. Two months later he met Paulie Malignaggi, the former boxing world champion with his own history with McGregor, in a grudge match at BKFC 6. Malignaggi took the first two rounds by consensus. Lobov kept marching, kept throwing, won rounds three through five and got 48-47 on all three cards.
The rematch with Knight at BKFC 9 in November 2019 ended with Lobov’s corner stopping it in the fifth. In July 2021, in Kyiv under the Mahatch FC banner, he took on Denys Berinchyk, a 2012 Olympic silver medalist and pro boxer. Berinchyk dropped him in the third and fourth, and Lobov didn’t come out for the fifth.
Since then the bookings have kept slipping away. A one-fight Arena Fight Championship deal led to a December 2020 date with Ylies Djiroun that was postponed over COVID-19 cases. After nearly seven years out of MMA, he was set to finally face Tukhugov at PFL Champions Series 3 on October 3, 2025, until the PFL scrapped it on September 30 because Lobov got hurt in training.
The brother he lost
The split with McGregor went legal in 2022, when Lobov sued over Proper No. 12 Irish Whiskey. Bloody Elbow reported he sought 5% of the $600 million the brand sold for, claiming a verbal agreement from 2017 and that the idea was his. The two settled in April, terms undisclosed, and it looked finished.
It wasn’t. After McGregor, whose return against Max Holloway at UFC 329 ended with him injured in the first round, said his next fight would be his last, Lobov replied on X that McGregor’s real last fight had happened years ago and that these days he was fighting to support a habit, adding that this was only his humble opinion. When McGregor’s fans came at him, he went further, naming teammates and coaches he says McGregor shortchanged and writing that the group had concluded drink and drugs brought out the worst in him. “Conor was my brother, I loved him like one,” he wrote. He called himself “the godfather of always showing up” and said he’d been asleep with his kids when McGregor called him out at 4 a.m.
McGregor’s next fight is the last on his UFC contract, with no opponent or date set. Lobov has no fight scheduled. What he has is a gym schedule he says he never missed, a mother he says was threatened, and a screenshot he posted alongside the accusation: a friendly direct-message exchange between the two men from some other, warmer time. “I sure miss my old brother,” he wrote.
