Former UFC heavyweight champion, Francis Ngannou, was released by PFL back in January.
Ngannou, 39, didn’t know it was announced until he read it online.
“We parted ways in January,” Ngannou (18-3) told Uncrowned. “I wanted to also give them a better way to come up with something, because that was their decision to part ways. Not mine. But I was a little surprised when they [made the announcement]. They should have at least told me since I was holding onto this. I found it a little weird that [PFL] didn’t come back to me to be like, ‘Okay, now we’re going to announce it.’ They didn’t even tell me. I just saw it out there. I wasn’t aware at all. At that point, I had been talking with Nakisa [Bidarian] for two or three weeks.”
“My word is my everything,” Verhoeven told Smash Cast. “For me, that was the thing, like, I gave my word. There were multiple people that really put their necks out for me. So that’s like Jason Statham, his excellency Turki Alalshikh, his right hand man Doctor Rakan [Al-Harty], and I was like this is what I got to do. The other option is amazing and they’re paying an amazing amount of money but I gave these guys my word.”
“No disrespect to Philipe, but I was very excited about the Rico fight,” Ngannou added. “And then when I heard that he signed to fight Usyk, I was a little disappointed, to be honest. I know that since maybe December or even before, he had a verbal agreement to fight in boxing, to fight potentially Usyk or AJ, somebody. So I knew that even when Nakisa approached me, he said, ‘This is the thing, Rico really likes this, but this is the position.’ And he was always quite clear about it.”