Conor Benn wants Conor McGregor in a boxing ring, and he’d like everyone to know he thinks it would be easy. The British boxer, nicknamed Destroyer, addressed the swirling crossover rumors on Tuesday and said he’d take the former two-division UFC champion “any day of the week,” according to reports from NDTV Sports, MMA Mania and Newswav. Benn’s message was that he’d dominate McGregor comfortably if they ever shared a ring.
NDTV Sports framed the comments as Benn breaking his silence on what it called shock McGregor fight rumors, with the talk coming after the Ryan Garcia defeat. None of the coverage describes a contract, a date, a venue or any sign that McGregor’s camp has answered. Right now this is a boxer talking about a fight that only exists in headlines.
Where McGregor actually is
The timing is awkward for anyone hoping to book this soon. McGregor is recovering from a knee injury he suffered at UFC 329, and his longtime coach John Kavanagh spent part of Tuesday talking through it in clips Ariel Helwani posted on X.
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Kavanagh shut down the theory that McGregor walked into that fight already hurt. “And for the conspiracy theorists out there, he walked in with no injury. Zero injury. There was absolutely no injury,” he said. He added that McGregor was “probably more healthy going into this one than the last few.”
He also described the opening kick McGregor had planned, a move Kavanagh said McGregor started every spar with. “Everything was really 100%, and then it wasn’t.”
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The aftermath sounded more practical than tragic. Kavanagh said McGregor immediately started asking about surgery options and recovery time, and that the next morning at McGregor’s house was full of his kids running around and laughing. He also pushed back on the idea that McGregor looked less confident than usual before UFC 329. McGregor, Kavanagh said, told him privately that he felt supremely confident going in.
On the future, Kavanagh left the door wide open. “He’s been very aggressive with his therapy and his recovery,” he said. “I just don’t feel he’s done with competition just yet. What does that look like? I don’t know.”
McGregor’s featherweight run still holds up historically. MMA Mania, writing after Alexander Volkanovski’s win over Movsar Evloev at UFC 333, put McGregor on the short list of great 145-pound UFC champions alongside Jose Aldo, Max Holloway, Volkanovski and Ilia Topuria, and called him one of the most special fighters to ever compete at the weight.
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My take
A professional boxer promising to beat an MMA fighter at boxing is the safest prediction in combat sports. Of course Benn thinks he wins. That’s the whole pitch. Saying it about a guy whose own coach is still describing the night his knee went at UFC 329 feels less like a callout and more like a guy grabbing the biggest name available to get his own back in the conversation. If McGregor ever does return, Kavanagh’s comments make it sound like the Octagon is the first thing on his mind. When Kavanagh asked himself whether McGregor can get back into fight shape, his answer was “If anybody can, he can,” and nowhere in that did he mention a boxing ring.
