Dana White offers Floyd Mayweather $25 million to fight Conor McGregor
Dana White has long scoffed off the notion that Conor McGregor would ever face Floyd Mayweather in a boxing ring. But all that changed on Friday when the UFC president offered up McGregor on a platter along with a multimillion-dollar offer and a cut of what he believes would be blockbuster pay-per-view revenue.
“We’ll pay you $25 million,” White announced on Colin Cowherd’s Fox Sports 1 show (via TMZ Sports) on Friday. “We’ll pay Conor $25 million and then we’ll talk about PPV at a certain number. There’s a real offer.”
White’s “real offer” comes just days after Mayweather went on ESPN’s “First Take” and said he had offered the Irishman $15 million for the fight.
“We tried to make the Conor McGregor fight. We are willing to give him $15 million and then we can talk about splitting the percentage — the back end — on the pay-per-view. But of course, we’re the ‘A side,’ ” Mayweather said, using fight lingo to denote he believes he’d be the main draw between the two. “How can a guy talk about making $20 [million] or $30 million if he has never made $8 [million] or $9 million in a fight.”
On Friday, White objected to several of Mayweather’s statements, including that McGregor’s never made more than $8 million for a fight. (UFC does not disclose fighters’ payments.) White said Mayweather never made any kind of offer, $15 million or otherwise, and that if anyone was the “A-side,” it was McGregor.
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“How are you the ‘A-side?’ ” White said, referring to Mayweather. “The last major fight that you were in, you left such a bad taste in everybody’s mouth that nobody wants to see you again. Your last fight did 350,000 pay-per-view buys.”
Actually, Mayweather’s last fight, against Andrew Berto in 2015, did somewhere between 400,000 and 550,000 PPV buys, according to ESPN, which is still short of McGregor’s last two bouts that did 1.3 million and 1.5 million PPV buys, respectively.
“So I don’t understand how you think you’re the ‘A-side,’ ” White continued. “There’s a reason why you want this Conor McGregor fight so bad, because you know that’s your money fight.”
As of Friday afternoon, Mayweather had not publicly responded to White’s offer, but there’s almost no chance he’ll bite.
“They know what my number is. My number is a guaranteed $100 million,” Mayweather said on Wednesday. “That was my number.”
And that is likely not a number UFC’s boss will go for.
“I don’t know,” White said on Friday. “This whole thing is so weird.”
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