Dana White’s dismissive response to the Conor McGregor verdict speaks volumes

Late Saturday night, UFC CEO Dana White finally commented on the fact that Conor McGregor, the biggest draw in company history, was found liable by a jury of his peers in a case where a woman claimed to have been “brutally raped and battered” by the UFC fighter in a Dublin hotel room six years ago.

While businesses, pubs, gyms, sports teams and more have cut ties with McGregor and people literally took to the streets to denounce the former champion in his native Ireland, the business most associated with him, the UFC, took 15 days to offer this.

White feigned incredulity at why anyone would lob such an inquiry his way. "What do you mean, what's my reaction?” he said at UFC 310's post-fight press conference. “If I had a comment, I would've put it out already.”

Then, in a textbook example of promoter speak, he distanced the UFC from McGregor while opening the door for the two-time champion’s return. "He hasn't been fighting here in, I don't know how long."

"If he does fight, it'll be sometime next year.”

There was an era when UFC would certainly have terminated its professional relationship with a man adjudicated to have sexually assaulted a woman. Ask Miguel Torres, a 40-4 fighter in 2011 when he was fired from White’s roster for tweeting a sexual assault joke he’d heard on a sitcom. White told ESPN at the time: “The fact that he even thinks that's funny or that's a joke, it disturbs me.”

It isn’t only White who is rather harder to disturb these days. Many within the fight industry find themselves unable to full-throatily condemn McGregor, contorted as we are by our endless compromises in justifying continuing to profit from the likes of Floyd Mayweather, Mike Tyson, Jon Jones and even White himself, among so many others.

Outside of Ireland, and perhaps the UK, the fight world appears equally as unlikely as the UFC to exile McGregor who, it will soon be repeatedly pointed out, lost a civil case and has not been found guilty of a sex crime in a criminal trial. No doubt we’ll continue to ignore, excuse and alibi because we can’t move on from the fact that, eight years or so ago, he was the world’s second- or third-best mixed martial artist.

Those who believe this situation is the UFC’s “biggest headache in 31 years” are naïvely conflating how McGregor’s civil judgement was received in Ireland and how it will affect the bottom line in America where, bluntly, at least 76 million citizens feel being found liable for sexual abuse is no disqualifier for their support.

UFC could and should get rid of McGregor though.

Parent company TKO put a bullet in WWE mastermind Vince McMahon because a woman filed a civil suit alleging sexual misconduct.

UFC dumping McGregor sounds impossible, but the company’s bottom line would barely miss the one-man crime wave. The year 2024 is indeed a record one for UFC revenue, topping the $1.3 billion in 2023, which was a 13% increase from 2022, which itself was a 20% surge from 2021, the most recent year McGregor made it to the Octagon.

It is there in black and white — McGregor’s absence has not affected the UFC’s business. And that absence will continue to be felt less and less as time moves on.

UFC’s exclusive broadcast deal with ESPN is up at the end of 2025 and, unlike the previous rights deal window in 2018, UFC has no reason to point out the prospects of McGregor pay-per-view revenue during their negotiation. Purely on the merits of what they’ve accomplished at ESPN, the company is going to get galactically massive, guaranteed revenue from ESPN, Netflix, Amazon or a combination of new partners. Not one executive at any of those streaming giants will insist UFC brings back McGregor.

There are a multitude of reasons to believe McGregor is never going to fight again anyway.

It was overlooked due to the grotesqueries of his sexual assault, but in defending himself against Nikita Hand’s allegations, McGregor admitted under oath that he uses cocaine. "There was cocaine present in the vehicle,” McGregor said on the stand, as if he were accounting for an air freshener in the vague shape of a pine tree rather than illicit narcotics. Even White himself was notably swift to wonder, aloud and to a room full of reporters no less, whether McGregor’s insane behavior in New York around UFC 223 was influenced by “drugs.”

Cocaine use has been clinically proven to significantly reduce bone strength and density. In recent years, McGregor left leg has snapped in half and he pulled out of UFC 303 with a broken toe.

McGregor will be 37 in the new year. Fighters who enjoy the nightlife far less than McGregor are already in advanced decline by that age. But more than physical decline, McGregor’s abilities to regulate his emotions and assert self-control also have been failing for a long time.

At this point, we should circle back and remind ourselves that the damning events of December 2018 are not the only incident where McGregor has acted in a violent or unhinged manner.

Attempts at a recap of his violent outbursts must be terse but, nevertheless, deep breath now: McGregor has struck a MMA official, a fan taking a picture, a 50-year-old who declined to drink his whiskey, the presenter of the Italian version of "The X-Factor," and even sent Burnie, the Miami Heat mascot, to the emergency room. He threw a punch at rapper Machine Gun Kelly on the red carpet of the MTV Video Music Awards four years ago. He threw energy drink cans across a crowded auditorium at Nate Diaz. Everyone reading this will know what “the dolly” means and why a clearly shaken White called it “the most disgusting incident” in UFC history.

McGregor has been arrested and/or criminally investigated in Dublin (multiple times), New York, Miami, Corsica and Italy. He has also dabbled in non-violent crimes, having been fined for driving dangerously without a license or insurance in his native Ireland.

At least four women have accused McGregor of assault, one of which proved it in a civil court.

The sheer amount and variety of crazed incidents involving McGregor paint a vivid mugshot of an individual who believes there are no constraints on his behavior. That if he wants to do something, anywhere, anytime and even to anyone, he feels as entitled as a demi-god.

McGregor has stated he will file an appeal against the adjudication in the civil case with Hand, and legally must do so before December 20. If the higher court agrees to hear his appeal, that will undoubtedly take even more of his time and attention away from MMA. McGregor successfully got the court to postpone his civil trial from earlier this year, prevailing upon the judge that he couldn’t train for UFC 303 and prepare for court at the same time.

Taking him at his word, it seems McGregor can fight in court or fight in MMA, not both. Weighed against all the above, the prospect of McGregor fighting in the UFC again soon seems more remote than ever. And clearly, UFC is in no hurry to roll the dice on McGregor again.

UFC had to scramble to save UFC 303 in July, when McGregor pulled out with weeks to go with a broken toe. In the end, Alex Pereira stepped in with his own toe broken to save the event. It was interesting White didn’t rebook McGregor for the rest of the year despite the UFC's top pay-per-view attraction insisting “We deserve December.” More interesting still was that White told Jim Rome in November that McGregor won’t be back until the “later part” of 2025.

We are kidding ourselves to expect UFC to be put under any pressure from advertisers or broadcast partners to cut him, and yet, one wonders how successful a McGregor fight could even be outside the UFC’s best-in-class promotional machine? McGregor vs. Jake Paul would certainly melt Netflix’s beleaguered servers, but it’d be a one-off that would do little more than whet the streaming giant’s appetite for the kind of content that UFC delivers more of, and better, than anyone else.

It's possible the PFL — who’ve demonstrated no ability to promote pay-per-views thus far — could find investors willing to front the cash to sign McGregor. But then what? Even if — if — the event turned a profit, the promotion’s long-term prospects would not be any more secure.

As White knows full well, time is on the UFC’s side.

So, most likely the UFC keeps McGregor in abeyance: Under contract, offering him fights per their deal, but ambivalent to him ever making it to a professional fight again. White's late 2025 will turn into early 2026 and then late 2026 and, after then, who will really care?

This may well be how the career of the biggest star in MMA history ends — in a drawn-out disgrace and ever-increasing degrees of exile.