Conor McGregor ineligible to fight in 2023, and an early 2024 return also seems unlikely

Conor McGregor hasn’t fought in nearly two years and it should surprise nobody if it gets a lot closer to three calendar years before he ever sets foot into the Octagon again with gloves on his hands. On Tuesday, McGregor failed to register with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, making him ineligible to compete for the remainder of 2023.

UFC fighters must be in USADA’s testing pool for six months before they’re able to compete again, meaning sometime in January 2024 is now the earliest McGregor could fight Michael Chandler, whom he’s appeared with on the reality series, “The Ultimate Fighter.”

But will he fight then?

Unlikely.

His fiancee, Dee Devlin, is pregnant with the couple’s fourth child. Plus, McGregor is not likely to want to train through the holidays, so it wouldn’t be a bad guess to predict McGregor may not fight Chandler until sometime in the second quarter or perhaps even in the early third quarter of next year.

Now, of course, it may not be entirely up to him. A woman accused McGregor of sexually assaulting her in a bathroom during Game 4 of the NBA Finals in Miami. TMZ published video showing McGregor leading the woman into the bathroom.

McGregor has denied the allegations, but he won’t have a say in when he fights if something comes of that case.

Any McGregor fight at this point is almost guaranteed to be a huge money-maker for the UFC, for ESPN and certainly for McGregor himself. But the UFC can afford to wait on McGregor, the biggest star in its history by an almost incomprehensible margin, because it’s become a money-making machine. So while the UFC would love McGregor to fight tonight, the company’s fortunes don’t depend on any one fighter, even one as valuable as McGregor.

Why McGregor has failed to reenter the USADA pool is open to question, and only he can answer that. He is significantly more muscular than he was when he broke his leg during a July 10, 2021, fight in Las Vegas at UFC 264 with Dustin Poirier.

He’s looked good in the brief glimpses the public has had of him in the Octagon since on TUF or on clips shared via social media. McGregor’s leg injury was severe, though, and the clips can’t really show how well it’s healed.

If he were to have taken a boxing match again, say against influencer Jake Paul, the leg wouldn’t have been as big of an issue as it would be in an MMA fight where he needs it to kick and to be able to take kicks.

McGregor’s frame is now massive and it appears like the odds of him fighting at 155 pounds, as he has done exclusively since Nov. 12, 2016, are unlikely. It appears more likely he’ll fight Chandler at welterweight or at a catchweight of his choosing.

But before he fights, McGregor must be confident that his leg is fully healed and able to withstand the rigors of an MMA fight against a highly skilled, aggressive opponent. Though Chandler’s style appears made for McGregor’s counter punching style, Chandler fights at a furious pace and even in bouts he loses, he punishes his opponents.

McGregor has clearly worked hard to rebuild his body. But in this day and age, anytime an athlete’s body changes dramatically, speculation immediately mounts about the use of anabolic steroids or other performance enhancing substances.

Steroids are a Schedule III substance and are illegal to own and distribute without a prescription, but there is virtually never action taken against anyone outside a testing regimen. If police did enforce that, there’d be arrests made daily at gyms around the country.

It’s why boxing still has a significant anti-doping issue, because there is no 24-7-365 testing. Fighters can, and do, use PEDs in boxing and don’t get caught because they are able to figure out the timing of when they may test positive. Even the best drug testing in boxing is easily beatable because it’s not a year-round thing.

But UFC fighters are subject to 24-7-365 testing, so a fighter wouldn’t enter a testing pool until he or she was certain of his/her ability to pass tests.

McGregor is the only one who knows why he’s not yet in the testing pool, or when he will be, and he’s not talking.

To be fair, there could be a million and one reasons why he’s chosen to wait, with none of them having a thing to do with PEDs.

He’ll for certain be back at some point, though, because a fight with Chandler will provide him with a significant enough payday that it will hurt him to miss it. But UFC is steamrolling along, basically printing money, and isn’t pushing all buttons possible to get him to fight on the soonest date possible.

No doubt, the UFC wants clarity and wants to be able to move forward with its business.

Both of them, though, are financial juggernauts in their particular spaces, McGregor as a fighter and UFC as a promoter. Neither is desperate to get this done.

The rest of us who are eager to see McGregor 3.0 are just going to have to have a lot more patience, because it doesn’t seem to be happening any time soon.