This should give Conor McGregor a much-needed confidence boost.
Shortly after it was announced that Ronda Rousey would be returning to fight for the title at UFC 207, Dana White said the following of the former women’s bantamweight champion during an interview with Hot 97:
“By far. Not even close, by far the biggest star ever.”
A lot of people were skeptical when the UFC president made this statement, especially considering he conveniently dropped it in promotion of her highly anticipated return.
The doubters were correct.
White was was wrong.
"I'm not trying to insult them, there's just not another word out there – they're dumb"https://t.co/JojaVK2MDg
— FootballJOE (@FootballJOE) October 28, 2016
There’s no prize for guessing that accolade belongs to Conor McGregor. We did, after all, give it away in the headline.
MMAJunkie obtained internal UFC documents that were prepared as part of a presentation to potential investors before the promotion’s $4 billion sale to WME-IMG. These documents reveal The Notorious is the biggest draw in the sport’s history.
The documents state that McGregor’s two PPV fights in 2015, the interim featherweight title fight against Chad Mendes at UFC 189 and his title unification bout against Jose Aldo at UFC 194, accounted for more than a quarter of the UFC’s total pay-per-view sales in the entire year. Both events did a combined total of combined 2.025 million buys.
In comparison, Ronda Rousey sold a combined 2.6 million pay-per-views over the course of three events in 2015.
However, after McGregor added a further 1.3 million more buys in his first fight with Nate Diaz in 2016, the UFC highlighted him as not only the biggest draw at the moment, but also in the history of the promotion.
The document cites McGregor crossing the one million buy threshold in two of his three headlining efforts, comparing his drawing power favourably to “seasoned fighters (Brock) Lesnar and (Anderson) Silva who have achieved only (one) such fight to date.”
It goes on to state that between 2012 and 2015, McGregor and Rousey have accounted for 56.1% of all pay-per-view sales.
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