Dustin Poirier cautions fans for another potential Conor McGregor UFC comeback
On top of thinking the guy’s a “dirtbag,” Dustin Poirier also thinks the UFC’s top draw has scammed fans one too many times.
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The latest fleecing came this past Saturday at UFC 329, where McGregor fought for the first time after five years away. He lost with a 69-second TKO when he apparently injured his knee, though massive online speculation is that he entered the fight with the injury.
Included in there are theories that he fought under the direction of the UFC because of the large betting handle on the fight and the tickets that already had been sold, which gave the UFC its largest gate in history – by a wide margin – at $26.4 million at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
In 2024, the UFC announced McGregor’s return for UFC 303 in Las Vegas and put tickets on sale that eventually turned into a gate near $16 million – all to announce McGregor had pulled out with a broken toe about two weeks before the fight.
Poirier holds two wins over McGregor, including the one in which the Irishman broke his leg in 2021 that led to the lengthy layoff to begin with. And he thinks at this point, if McGregor tried to return from this latest injury, it’d be a sham for the UFC and McGregor to try to tell fans they were getting the same product they got in 2016 when he fought Nate Diaz twice.
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“Of course the world would watch him fight Diaz for the trilogy. The world would watch anything he does, especially in combat sports,” Poirier recently told boxing analyst Teddy Atlas on “The Fight,” Atlas’ podcast. “I’m not sure the extent of his injuries. If it’s a torn ACL after five years away, that’s another year on the sideline. At his age, I think he’s done. If he tore his ACL, he’s done. He’ll never come back the same, and uh that was the big question coming into this one: Can he pull it all together after this horrific injury and come back?”
But even beyond that, Poirier obviously has no love lost with McGregor, who was not kind, to say the least, toward Poirier and his family when they fought.
“How many times can you cry wolf before the fans are like, ‘We’re not breaking (UFC) ticket gate records anymore. We’re not coming. We’re not flying across the world to watch you fight. We know what we get with you: a flash … a flash in the pan,'” Poirier said.
“How many times can you do this before people start moving on?”
This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: Dustin Poirier cautions fans for another potential Conor McGregor UFC comeback
