Conor McGregor | Photo by Justin Setterfield/Getty Images
Conor McGregor’s name and history still carry a lot of weight.
On New Year’s Day, McGregor announced that he is fighting Michael Chandler at an upcoming UFC event on June 29 during International Fight Week. The bout is yet to be made official by the UFC, but that hasn’t stopped oddsmakers from setting a line for the prospective matchup.
According to DraftKings, the opening line sees McGregor as a slight favorite at -120. A $ 100 bet on McGregor would provide a return of $ 183.33. A bet on Chandler, the underdog at +100, would win a $ 200 payout.
McGregor has a 54.55 percent chance of victory, according to the opening line.
The former two-division champion returns to action for the first time since UFC 264 in July 2021. In a trilogy bout against Dustin Poirier, McGregor suffered a broken leg in the opening round that forced him to the sidelines for a prolonged period of time. There has been little MMA success for McGregor to speak of over the past seven years, with his lone win during that stretch being a 40-second knockout of Donald Cerrone at UFC 246 in January 2020.
Chandler has seen mixed results since making the jump from Bellator to the UFC. He is 2-3 inside the octagon, scoring wins over Tony Ferguson and Dan Hooker while racking up four post-fight bonuses in just five fights for the promotion.
Sean Strickland and Ian Garry have been embroiled in a feud for the last few months and the undefeated prospect is still feeling the brunt of it.
The fans seemingly sided with the middleweight champion during the online altercation, leaving ‘The Future’ in a strange place with supporters. Now with Strickland going through a rough patch, Garry wasted no time in kicking the man while he was down.
After news broke of Sean Strickland’s emotional breakdown on a podcast with Theo Von, Ian Garry took his chance to hit back in support of previous comments made toward himself and his wife.
“How the tables have turned. You dish it out in the lowest, most vile manner but can’t take a pinch. You attacked my wife incessantly and obsessively calling her a pedophile. It’s clear to see your childhood trauma showing.”
“You claimed you were ‘giving me advice’ before. Well, now it’s my turn to return the favor. You should shut your mouth and focus on the mirror because you have serious issues you need to solve.”
“I wish you all the best with them. Don’t ever project your pain onto me and my family again, Happy new year.”
Ian Garry responds back to Sean Strickland 👀 pic.twitter.com/J90nG3DG2F
— Spinnin Backfist (@SpinninBackfist) January 2, 2024
Things got so heated between the Irishman and Strickland that security was forced to step in. During the height of their feud, the pair encountered one another at the UFC PI, but staff acted fast to prevent anything serious from happening between them.
Related: Dana White announces several big fights, including HUGE UFC 300 announcement
When is Ian Garry fighting next?
Ian Garry was scheduled to compete at UFC 296 but was forced out of the show with pneumonia.
The surging competitor was set to compete against former training partner Vicente Luque before the bout was eventually scrapped from the card.
With his recovery well underway, Garry has landed on his feet following his recent setback. While he won’t be stepping in against Luque next, the 26-year-old has found himself a fight for UFC 298.
On February 17, Ian Garry will make his octagon return against a man he was previously locked in to fight just months earlier, Geoff Neal.
Ian Machado Garry was amused by Sean Strickland’s recent thoughts on his back-and-forth with Dricus Du Plessis last month (Dec. 15, 2023).
Strickland, 32, is as vocal as any fighter in mixed martial arts (MMA) when it comes to all topics imaginable. That includes family, which Ultimate Fighting Championship‘s (UFC) Middleweight champion recently went after in the case of Garry and his wife, Layla Anna-Lee.
After a decade-old book authored by Anna-Lee titled, How to be a WAG, surfaced online in late 2023, it opened up the family to tons of negativity from the community. Strickland, in particular, called out the couple and received lawsuit threats from the undefeated 13-0 Welterweight contender as a result. Ahead of his upcoming UFC 297 clash with Dricus Du Plessis this month (Sat., Jan. 20, 2024), Strickland admitted to being bothered by his opponent’s comments about his childhood, stating such things are “off limits.” Catching wind of the sentiment, Garry flipped the script.
“How the tables have turned,” Garry commented on MMA Fighting’s Instagram post. “You dish it out in the lowest most vile manner but can’t take a pinch. You attacked my wife incessantly and obsessively calling her a peadofile, it’s clear to see your childhood trauma showing. You claimed you were ‘giving me advice’ before, well now it’s my turn to return the favor. You should shut your mouth [zipper mouth emoji] and focus on the mirror because you have enough serious issues you need to solve. I wish you all the best with them. Don’t ever project your pain onto me and my family again. Happy New Year [party and kiss emojis].”
Garry was originally set to compete during the week Strickland and Du Plessis had their blow-up at UFC 296 last month (Dec. 16, 2023). Unfortunately for “The Future,” he was knocked out of his bout with Vicente Luque via a case of pneumonia, leading him to a rebooking with Geoff Neal for UFC 298 next month (Sat., Feb. 17, 2024).
Andre Fili’s first knockout in over four years should have been the story of his fight week.
In all likelihood, he’ll remember UFC 296 for what happened in the days leading up to it.
On Saturday, Fili picked up a spectacular first-round TKO of Lucas Almeida to return to the win column and keep his UFC record above the .500 mark. The 14-year veteran entered the contest with a heavy heart as he had to put down his beloved dog Harley a day before flying to Las Vegas to compete.
Fili recounted the story during an appearance on The MMA Hour.
“It was really tough,” Fili said. “I didn’t grow up with pets, I didn’t really grow up with animals. It wasn’t really a thing we did, we just didn’t have pets. So I got this dog eight years ago, and he became my best friend. I was mentally prepared for him to get old, I understand he’s eight years old, I understood he wasn’t young. I thought he had a few more years left. I was able to wrap my head around the idea of him getting older and him passing away; I knew that was an inevitability.
“What I wasn’t prepared for was him just being gone one day. Dogs, they love you so much, and they’re always in the moment, they’re always happy, they’re always sharing the moment, so they don’t show a lot of pain. Obviously, they can’t speak to you and articulate what they’re going through, so I think he had a tumor that had been growing for probably a long time, but it wasn’t something that I was aware of.”
Fili recalls going to bed last Sunday and waking up Monday to find Harley wasn’t moving and was struggling to breathe. It was obvious that something was wrong, and the timing couldn’t be worse with Fili and his team set to fly out Tuesday.
The fighter hoped that it would simply be a matter of paying for a treatment that would bring Harley back to health, but when they went to the vet, they received a grave diagnosis.
“So I take him to the vet, I’m expecting to give him some antibiotics or some expensive bulls***, and he’ll feel better,” Fili said. “Literally, when the doctor came back into the room, I could see in her face that it was not that. I asked her, I just immediately said, ‘It’s bad, huh?’ She shook her head and said, ‘Yeah, he has a tumor that’s grown very aggressively in his spleen, and it’s causing internal bleeding, and he has blood loss and that’s why he has low energy.’ She basically referred us to a surgeon—mind you, this is Monday, we leave for fight week Tuesday—it’s 3:30 in the middle of the day, I’m on the phone with one vet who’s essentially saying, ‘We can do emergency surgery tonight for $ 10,000. It’s going to be a very hard surgery on the dog, and we’re not sure if it will fix the problem.’ Ten thousand dollars, it’s going to be very hard, and he might not survive it. If he survives it, he will probably have to go through chemo. If you put him through chemo, and the chemo has any real adverse effects, which it probably will, we’ll suggest you put him down.
“So it was like on one path was this long string of invasive things that would make my dog’s quality of life bad, and then literally on the other line, I have a vet saying we can put your dog down, but our last appointment is at five. And this is 3:30 in the middle of the day, so I have an hour and a half to make a choice and say goodbye to my dog essentially. And I’m cutting weight and I’m packing my bags to leave for fight week. So I just sucked it up, I went and cut some weight in the garage, rinsed off, and I had about 45 minutes to say goodbye to my dog and then we drove him to the vet, we put him down and said goodbye to him and came home, packed our bags, and went to sleep. Woke up for fight week.”
Astonishingly, Harley’s death wasn’t the only recent tragedy that Fili had to deal with.
Fili mentioned in his post-fight speech that he also saw two friends pass away during his preparation for UFC 296. It was a series of experiences that wounded him, but also provided valuable perspective.
“I also had a friend get hit who was riding his Harley Davidson, he got hit by an Amazon truck and died almost instantly,” Fili said. “He was like a little brother to me. That happened at the start of the camp, six weeks out. Two weeks after, my friend got hit on his motorcycle. I had another friend who I’ve known for 20 years pass away, he overdosed.
“I’ve had all these things happen. I’ve dealt with all these things, and the only choice was either to dwell on it and just wallow in it, or just hopefully take the lesson of none of this s*** is guaranteed. I don’t mean to be morbid, but this could be the last time you and I ever speak. None of this is guaranteed, and it’s a cliché, people say it all the time, but it never registered until recently. You really have to appreciate each moment. You might only get to do this this one time, and being able to do it this one time is a gift. So I went into fight week like it was my debut. I went into fight week like I was doing everything for the first time.”
Through it all, Fili persevered, taking Almeida out inside of a round to score his first finish since a first-round knockout of Sheymon Moraes in July 2019. Watching Fili’s performance and celebration, one could be forgiven for not realizing the inner turmoil he was hiding up until that moment.
Once he had some time for himself, though, it was a different story.
“When I win the fight, and I hug my teammates and I tell my coaches I love them, just be present and be grateful and enjoy it, because I understand that loss is part of life, but the losses I’ve taken recently have happened so fast that the only way that I can deal with is to just take the lesson of being grateful for right now,” Fili said. “That’s what I leaned into this fight week. Every moment of the fight and every moment of the process, even the weight cut, every single piece of this fight camp, and this fight week, and this fight-night I practiced gratitude for.
“And then I left the arena, shook hands, laughed, hugged, said all the ‘I love yous,’ got escorted from the front of [the] New York New York [casino] into an elevator to go back to my room. I was in an elevator by myself, I was finally alone for the first time the entire week, and then I broke down and cried in the elevator by myself. I was able to finally get it out, but it took a whole week of not being able to process it.”
Amid an announcement revealing his return to the UFC at an earmarked UFC 302 event on June 29. – ex-two-weight champion, Conor McGregor has opened as a slight betting favorite to beat Michael Chandler in a planned middleweight matchup this summer.
McGregor, a former undisputed lightweight and featherweight champion under the banner of the UFC, has been sidelined since he took main event honors at UFC 264 back in July 2021, fracturing his left leg in a doctor’s stoppage TKO loss to Dustin Poirier.
As for Chandler, the former three-time Bellator MMA lightweight kingpin has yet to make his return since he dropped a third round rear-naked choke loss to common-foe, Poirier back in November 2022 at Madison Square Garden.
And appearing to confirm a UFC 302 battle at the middleweight limit during International Fight Week in June coming, McGregor has opened as a slight betting favorite at -120 to beat Michael Chandler, who has opened as a +100 betting underdog.
Conor McGregor opens as favorite to beat Michael Chandler
A slew of markets and bookies are already offering odds on McGregor’s comeback fight against Chandler, including outlets which offer you the chance to try Casino Dailyspins – which is sure to bring with it blockbuster numbers and fan fervor.
Without a victory since 2020, McGregor, who would become the first fighter with wins spanning a staggering four separate weight classes should he beat Chandler in an earmarked middleweight fight at UFC 302,
In his most recent win, McGregor turned in a 40-second stoppage of Donald Cerrone at the welterweight limit – blitzing though the Hall of Fame inductee with a vicious high-kick and follow-up strikes knockout win over the Colorado veteran.
As for Chandler, the one-time lightweight title chaser landed a hellacious second round front kick KO win over former interim champion, Tony Ferguson at UFC 274 in May 2022 – landing one of the most brutal finishes in the history of the organization.
And all while the promotion have yet to officially announce a revealed UFC 302 headliner between McGregor and Chandler during International Fight Week, the Crumlin counter striker was steadfast in his confirmation of a fight with the Kill Cliff FC staple over the course of the weekend.
“Ladies and gentleman, a Happy New Year to you all,” Conor McGregor said in the video posted on social media. “I would like to announce the return date for myself, ‘The Notorious’ Conor McGregor, the greatest comeback of all time, will take place in Las Vegas, for International Fight Week, on June 29.”
pic.twitter.com/Jje2yYoQoE
— Conor McGregor (@TheNotoriousMMA) December 31, 2023
“Come a little closer, and the opponent; Michael Chandler,” Conor McGregor continued. “And the weight, Mr. Chandler, 185 pounds [laughing].”
And whilst Missouri native, Chandler has welcomed the opportunity to fight at the middleweight limit against McGregor, former two-weight champion, Daniel Cormier has urged the former to stop dancing to the Dubliner’s tune as often as he appears to be.
“I think this is a game, I think Conor McGregor is the puppetmaster, and I think Michael Chandler is being far too easy to play with,” Daniel Cormier said. “At this point, Michael Chander is Pinocchio. Conor McGregor’s doing stuff like (pulling his strings) with Michael Chandler and I don’t like it, because I like Michael Chandler. But I think he’s doing too much.”
Who wins in a middleweight showdown this summer: Conor McGregor or Michael Chandler?
TKO Group Holdings — the merged company between the UFC and WWE — may have taken a hit in stock prices since first launching this past September, but the company could be poised for a massive rebound in 2024.
The company opened on the NYSE at $ 102, but as of closing on Tuesday, it currently sits at just over $ 80 per share. That dip may not look promising, but at least one Wall Street analyst is backing TKO for a huge year ahead, especially with a pair of lucrative television contracts in the works.
Eric Handler, an analyst at Roth MKM, touted TKO as his top pick for the entertainment industry heading into 2024.
“We continue to have a positive view toward sports/live events programming, especially those with a high level of revenue being contractually guaranteed,” Handler told The Hollywood Reporter. “The market for sports rights fees remains strong, aided by an increasing number of interested distributors.”
The changing landscape for television in the streaming era has dramatically affected the entertainment industry, triggering two historically long strikes involving actors via SAG-AFTRA and writers via the Writer’s Guild of America (disclosure: Vox Media Union is part of the Writer’s Guild of America East). Those strikes were largely centered around pay, especially as streaming services like Netflix continue to eat up an even larger share of the overall marketplace for television and film.
Meanwhile, live sports rights fees continue to balloon, with networks and streamers willing to pay a premium price for events that aren’t typically affected by work stoppages or production delays. Add to that, live sporting events also draw massive ratings as evidenced by the NFL’s continued domination, prompting Amazon to pay $ 11 billion for a single weekly game for the next 11 years.
At TKO Group Holdings, the WWE has already negotiated a new deal for Smackdown and NXT, two of the top programs at the professional wrestling outfit, with a third contract still to come for Monday Night Raw, the longest running episodic series in TV history. Handler has faith that those rights fees will offer a robust bottom line for TKO in 2024, which will only increase stock prices for investors.
Meanwhile, the UFC is eyeing a new broadcast rights deal in 2024 with the current ESPN deal expiring in 2025. Right now, ESPN maintains exclusive rights over all UFC programming, including the pay-per-view broadcasts that played a massive part in the continued growth of the ESPN+.
With the UFC continuing to earn record revenue year after year, including sellouts for numerous events throughout the past few years, Handler expects the new TV deal for the promotion to explode in value.
“A UFC TV deal could be announced by year-end with new contract terms upwards of two times the current value,” Handler teased.
To put that in context, the UFC signed a deal with ESPN in 2018 reportedly worth around $ 1.5 billion, and by Handler’s estimates that means the promotion could be looking at around $ 3 billion for a new multi-year deal in 2024.
That all adds up to TKO Group Holdings poised for a huge year ahead with Handler predicting “mid-teens growth” for the company by the end of the year.
Just days into the new year and we already have big news in the mixed martial arts world. Less than a year after his initial retirement from the sport, Jorge Masvidal has hinted to the world that he is ready to make a return to the cage.
Despite bowing out of the sport on a bad run of performances, ‘Gamebred’ remains one of the biggest names in MMA. His iconic run in 2019 skyrocketed him to superstardom and fans were engaged with his career up until his final outing inside the octagon years later.
It now looks like his retirement was only temporary and Jorge Masvidal could be on his way back. In a short post on social media, the welterweight simply announced that he is unretiring, which was mostly welcomed by fans.
Unretired
— Jorge Masvidal (@GamebredFighter) January 2, 2024
While not much more was given away, speculation is beginning to grow surrounding Masvidal’s future. Some fans are questioning whether his return will actually be under the UFC banner or elsewhere.
The former 170 lbs title challenger has been linked with a venture into boxing for years but nothing ever unfolded for him.
Rumors are now suggesting that Jorge Masvidal could be on his way back to the octagon in time for UFC 300. His presence would undoubtedly be a huge boost to the card and could add another blockbuster fight to what is expected to be one of the greatest events the sport has ever seen.
Related: Jorge Masvidal wants to fight ‘cupcake’ Colby Covington in his own bareknuckle fight promotion
Who called Jorge Masvidal out for a fight during his retirement?
Despite being retired since April, Masvidal has been eyed for a potential bareknuckle clash against one of the sport’s very best.
Now knock as the face of BKFC, Mike Perry has become a revelation since losing the gloves and engaging in bloody brawls for our entertainment.
Following his significant victory over Eddie Alvarez last time out, ‘Platinum’ had his eyes set on several combat sports legends for his next fight.
Alongside his callouts of Conor McGregor and Sean Strickland, Mike Perry claimed it would be an honor of his to welcome Jorge Masvidal back to bareknuckle boxing.
A definite tough fight, the toughest out there, would be the original bare knuckle boxer, I watched him on kimbofights on YouTube in high school, I know calling him out could open a whole new world between us but man to man for the prize of a lifetime it would be an honor to bare…
— Platinum Mike Perry (@PlatinumPerry) December 4, 2023
File under: Mmafighting.com | Leave a comment »