Conor McGregor spent part of this week explaining what turned him into a UFC superstar. ClutchPoints and Yahoo Sports both ran headlines Tuesday saying he broke down the reasons behind his success. The pitch, as framed, is a mix of mindset, selling the fight, and the technical work underneath it. I’m not grading the speech. I’m grading the receipts, because the 2026 calendar already has a pretty clear ledger on which half of that formula is still paying out.
The short version: the promotion half still prints money. The fighting half just cost him a knee.
The Commercial Half Still Works
Start with how the McGregor vs. Max Holloway rematch came together. Charles Oliveira took the BMF belt from Holloway in March, and by his own telling it wasn’t close. Oliveira out-grappled him and controlled him. Months later, Holloway was the one walking into a massive UFC headliner against McGregor, coming off that loss. Oliveira was the one on the sidelines, hoping for a lightweight title shot that never came, and eventually signing to defend the BMF strap against Diego Lopes.
Oliveira addressed that directly in an interview with MMA Fighting this week. He said people had told him, “If Charles had been more aggressive, maybe Charles could have gotten the kind of fight Max had with Conor.” His response was the best line of the week: “Would Conor even have accepted a fight with me?”
That’s a fair question, and the answer doesn’t really matter to the argument. The point is the money fight went to the guy who lost, because the other side of the contract was McGregor. That’s the commercial instinct he’s describing, working exactly as designed years after his last real run. A McGregor booking can turn a defeated former champion’s next appearance into the biggest card on the schedule. Nobody else on the roster can do that to a matchmaking queue.
The Craft Half Is Where the Numbers Turn Ugly
Now the fight itself. Holloway beat McGregor in under two minutes at UFC 329. According to Yahoo’s power rankings, published the same morning as the McGregor headlines, the end came after McGregor threw a spinning kick and tore up his knee. That same ranking wrote that Holloway didn’t even break a sweat, which is harsh and also hard to argue with when the official fight time is shorter than most walkouts.
I’ll say this as someone who has lost money on worse ideas, mostly involving parlays with more legs than a centipede: a spinning kick inside the first two minutes against Holloway is a low-percentage swing from a fighter who needed every percentage he could get. The formula only works if the second half holds up. At UFC 329, it didn’t hold up for 120 seconds.
Contrast that with Oliveira, who is the cleanest counterexample in the building. He has finished 21 of his 25 UFC wins since joining in 2010. He holds promotion records for finishes, submissions and bonuses. And after one dominant decision over Holloway, he got called boring. His answer to MMA Fighting was blunt: “What I want to know is what’s on Sherdog. It’s right there, a win or a loss.” He also said that if he’d lost to Mateusz Gamrot or Holloway, he wouldn’t be making the money he makes and wouldn’t even be in the UFC.
That’s the other formula. Win, keep winning, get paid on results. It’s slower, and it apparently doesn’t get you the Holloway rematch slot. But it ages a lot better.
What the Record Books Keep
Here’s a detail that stuck with me. In this week’s UFC 333 roundtable at MMA Fighting, Jed Meshew laid out José Aldo’s case as the featherweight GOAT, and McGregor came up as a line item. Aldo’s 11 title wins came almost entirely consecutively, Meshew wrote, 10 in a row and then re-winning the belt after McGregor. Alexander Volkanovski, who defends against Movsar Evloev in Abu Dhabi on Saturday, sits at eight by Meshew’s count.
That’s how the archive treats the sales side of a career. The pay-per-views fade. The title count sticks around for 20 years of roundtables.
None of this means McGregor is wrong about why he got famous. The selling was real, and the Holloway booking proves the name still moves a schedule around. My problem is with anyone treating his explanation as a blueprint for 2026. The commercial instinct got him the fight. The fight lasted under two minutes and ended with his knee in pieces.
Holloway sits eighth on Yahoo’s list and, per that ranking, is looking at either a title shot or another big name. Oliveira defends the BMF belt against Lopes on Dec. 12 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. McGregor has a knee to rehab and, if he ever wants to test both halves of his formula again, a rhetorical question from the BMF champion still sitting unanswered.
