Manchester United have lost and lost and then lost more miserably, of late. What would it take to turn things around? One particularly bombastic 32-year-old fan from Ireland has an idea. “Hey guys, I’m thinking about buying Manchester United! What do you think?” mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor tweeted on April 21.
(Mike Roach / Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)
For a club valued at $4.2 billion, it was clearly a throwaway jibe, but if any sportsperson could do it this year, it would be McGregor. He recently topped the Forbes list of highest-earning athletes for 2020-21, with reported earnings of $180 million — $50 million more than the second-placed Lionel Messi and $60 million more than the third-placed Cristiano Ronaldo.
This is a man whose best days in the ring are well and truly behind him; a fighter who has won only one match of the four he’s fought since 2017. And that’s the really interesting part: Of his $180 million, McGregor earned only $22 million through his sport. Most of his earnings came from outside the ring, including from the sale of his majority stake in his whiskey company, Proper No.Twelve.
Topping the Forbes list, then, comes down to the brand McGregor has turned himself into over the past decade. It’s a brand built on lethal moves inside the MMA cage and melodramatic trash talk outside it. The impact McGregor has had on mixed martial arts (MMA) has been compared to Michael Schumacher’s on Formula 1 and Lance Armstrong’s on competitive cycling.
His aggressive style — a combination of southpaw stance, ruthless punching, high kicks and preternatural reflexes — meant that most of his early victories came via knockouts. From 2013 to 2015, he remained unbeaten across seven consecutive Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) battles. In that time, he also used high-intensity psychological warfare to unnerve opponents. During the extended build-up tour for his first UFC title defence in 2015, for instance, McGregor ripped up a poster of his Brazilian opponent Jose Aldo in front of fans, put the shreds in his mouth, and then spat them out. He later played a game of darts using an image of Aldo’s face as the dartboard.
Between his fighting skills, histrionics and larger-than-life persona, McGregor took MMA mainstream.
It’s been a while since he slipped, in alarming fashion, from that pedestal as a fighter. Three of his last four fights were heavily one-sided wins for his opponents. But it has made no difference to his drawing power.
In 2017, amid this slide, McGregor (@thenotoriousmma on Twitter and Instagram) took on Floyd Mayweather Jr in a hysterically promoted “crossover” boxing match that was nicknamed The Money Fight. It was one of McGregor’s most embarrassing defeats (he looked like a lost child, trying to play by boxing’s rules against one of the foremost technicians of the sport). But he took home $85 million just for playing.
It would seem that as much as crowds were willing to pay to watch him win, they’ll pay to watch him lose just as gladly. The Mayweather fight earned 4.3 million pay-per-view buys, the second-highest number ever for a combat sport. The third-highest grosser, a 2018 MMA fight with 2.5 million PPV buys, also had McGregor headlining, against current MMA champion Khabib Nurmagomedov. There too, Nurmagomedov dominated the octagon completely.
Perhaps what keeps his audiences cheering, paying and loyal is his Everyman tale of rebellion to riches. McGregor used his fists and feet to go from a plumbing apprentice, the son of a taxi driver, to MMA’s wealthiest and most famous fighter yet.
At 18, he had his first bout as an amateur MMA fighter, in Dublin. He turned professional a year later and moved rapidly up from there.
He was inducted into the UFC, considered the pinnacle of MMA, in 2013. He won his first Featherweight world title in 2015 in a fight that earned UFC $7.2 million through gate money, a record in the US at the time. McGregor successfully defended his title in December that year with a 13-second knockout, the fastest finish in a UFC title fight. In 2016, he won the Lightweight title, becoming the first fighter in UFC history to hold titles in two different weight classes.
He was stripped of his titles in 2018 due to a year of inactivity. In a sense, he never came back from that. In another sense, it’s barely broken his stride. Like any self-respecting rockstar on the fade, McGregor has thrice announced his retirement since 2016, only to follow each announcement with a “comeback”.
He remains the most popular fighter in the sport. The top six pay-per-view events in UFC have featured McGregor; he won three of those fights. Playing against him guarantees stardom to his opponent. (In 2018, when McGregor lost to Nurmagomedov in a lightweight title fight, the latter’s social media following jumped by 3.1 million in 24 hours.)
So when the UFC hopes to open its gates to 20,000-plus spectators in Las Vegas in July, after almost two years of staging fights in empty arenas, guess who will headline the night?
THE HIGHLIGHTS REEL
* In his first-ever UFC fight in 2013, Conor McGregor won against Marcus Brimage in just 67 seconds, bagging a bonus of $60,000. “I was collecting 188 Euros a week off social welfare. Now here I am with a 60-Gs bonus. I don’t know what the f*** is going on,” he said after the win.
* In the last 12 months, the former plumbing apprentice has made $180 million. McGregor, 32, earned $158 million outside his fighting purse in that period. He is only the third active athlete after Roger Federer and Tiger Woods to earn more than $70 million in one year from off-field activities.
* Part of his success comes from the image he’s nurtured of a raving bad boy and troublemaker. In 2018, in Brooklyn, he threw a steel dolly at a bus carrying his arch-rival Khabib Nurmagomedov. Several other fighters were injured as the dolly struck and shattered a glass window. McGregor served five days of community service for the crime.
* In 2019, he was arrested for stomping on a fan’s phone when the latter was trying to take a photograph. In a Dublin bar, he hit a man for refusing his offer for a shot of whiskey, for which he was charged with assault and fined.
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