Conor McGregor wants Max Holloway one more time, and he wants it to be the last fight of his UFC career. In a profane rant that hit social media Saturday night, McGregor demanded a trilogy bout with the former featherweight champion, according to clips posted by Championship Rounds and Happy Punch on X. Yardbarker framed the callout as coming after an injury at UFC 329.
The clips are long on heat and short on specifics, so here’s what McGregor actually said, word for word:
“The guy didnt engage once. He’s the one that called for the stoppage... I’d have done him on the one leg.”
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He kept going. “Holloway might be a jackass, something might happen. But a fighter that fights me, put some respect on my name,” McGregor said. Then came the part that will end up on a T-shirt somewhere: “If you’re not a world champion fighter, don’t even utter my fcking name. If you’ve done fck all but got a few likes, go f*ck yourself.”
The available reporting doesn’t lay out the full sequence of what happened at UFC 329 or the extent of any injury, and nobody from the UFC has said a word about booking this. McGregor’s line about doing it “on the one leg” suggests he believes he’d have won even compromised, and his claim that Holloway “called for the stoppage” is his version of events. Treat it as exactly that until someone with a clipboard and a medical report says otherwise.
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Where Holloway fits
Holloway’s name has been in a lot of mouths this week, and not all of them friendly. On Friday, Ilia Topuria told Spanish outlet ABC that Alexander Volkanovski is the greatest featherweight ever, while reminding everyone of his own resume. “Yes, I beat him. I beat Max Holloway. I did things nobody else had done,” Topuria said, as posted by Championship Rounds. Topuria also said he likes Volkanovski too much to fight him again, which is the nicest thing anyone said about anybody in MMA this week.
Then on Sunday, welterweight Joaquin Buckley tossed Holloway into a group callout alongside Dustin Poirier, Sean Strickland, Josh Hokit and Alexander Volkov. Buckley’s challenge was about a nightclub DJ booth, not a cage. Holloway has not publicly responded to McGregor in any of the source material, and there’s no word on a date, a venue or a weight class.
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Sal’s take
I’ve been doing this long enough to know that a McGregor callout and a McGregor fight are two different products, and only one of them comes with a bout agreement. A trilogy billed as a farewell is a fine pitch for a poster. As a betting proposition it’s a blank page. We don’t have a confirmed medical status for anybody involved, we don’t have a promotion saying yes, and we don’t have a line. When a book hangs a number on this, I’ll look at it, and if McGregor opens as a short favorite off whatever happened at UFC 329, I’ll be the grumpy guy in the corner circling Holloway, because a man with that gas tank does not stop being live just because the other guy yelled louder.
