Conor McGregor says his next UFC fight will be his last, and he wants the box office to look like 2016 all over again.
The Irishman has one fight remaining on his UFC contract, MMA Weekly reported Monday, and he intends for that bout to close out his career. He laid out the plan himself on X on Nov. 1, in a post that opened as a jab at Canelo Alvarez and finished as a sales pitch for his own farewell.
McGregor wrote that for his next fight, which he called his final one, he’s going to actually try to sell it, see what kind of numbers he can generate and keep outdoing his own records.
There’s no opponent attached, and nobody has put a date or a venue on it either. Diario AS framed it as a major announcement about his UFC future, which is fair enough, though for now it reads more like a mission statement than a signed bout agreement.
Canelo catches a stray
The post landed right after Canelo captured the WBC super middleweight title on Saturday. McGregor watched the fight and went straight for the accounting department.
“How many views did the Canelo fight get? How many in attendance? Gate?” he wrote. “Man I outdo ALL of these people in sales. Majorly. EVERY SINGLE ONE. With ease. Maybe even combined.”
Then, for good measure, he added that he does all that without even trying.
He also pointed back to going head to head with a World Cup semifinal and still pulling big numbers, and he made clear the wait isn’t over. McGregor said he still has to sit with that last outing for another few months before he returns.
The numbers he’s chasing
The bragging has a foundation. McGregor holds eight of the top 10 pay-per-view buys in UFC history, according to MMA Weekly, and he wants the final fight to beat records he set roughly a decade ago.
The other side of the ledger is tougher. He’s 38, and he has fought once in the last five years. That’s a long time to be away from the cage while insisting you’re still the biggest draw on the planet, and the gap between talking about a fight and actually walking out for one has been wide for McGregor lately.
My take: I’ll give him this, he answered the question straight. He said final fight, he said he’s going to sell it, and he said he wants to break his own numbers. That’s more clarity than most stars offer about retirement, and it beats a cryptic emoji at 2 a.m. But a sales pitch needs a product, and a pay-per-view record needs a name across the cage. Until the UFC puts an opponent and a date on a poster, the only timeline on record is McGregor’s own estimate of another few months.
