As Francis Ngannou was walking to the cage for his fight against Philipe Lins, White went live on Instagram with news that McGregor was finally making his return to the octagon for the first time in five years for a rematch against Max Holloway that headlines UFC 329 in July. Rumors about McGregor\u2019s comeback have been swirling for weeks so it wasn\u2019t exactly a surprise that White decided to make the fight official during the MVP event, which was headlined by Ronda Rousey against Gina Carano.<\/p>\n
Paul wasn\u2019t surprised how it all went down but he also knows for a fact that White was obviously paying attention to his new competition with the attention the MVP MMA card was receiving head of Saturday night\u2019s event.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe cokehead is back!\u201d Paul said about McGregor\u2019s return to action. \u201cNice. Yeah, that\u2019s cool. Drop it during our event. It doesn\u2019t matter. That just shows how pressed they are.<\/p>\n
\u201cLittle insecure boys trying to piggyback off of our event and try to put some news over top of us. It\u2019s not going to work buddy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Viewership numbers for the Rousey vs. Carano card won\u2019t likely be made available for a few days and ultimately it\u2019s up to Netflix to divulge the exact audience that tuned into the event.<\/p>\n
That said, Paul and his business partner Nakisa Bidarian both sounded very happy with the early returns from the event.<\/p>\n
By all accounts, Most Valuable Promotions \u2014 which up to this point had only promoted boxing events \u2014 is invested in future MMA cards after the success from Saturday\u2019s show.<\/p>\n
Perhaps that even means teaming with McGregor at some point in the future because Bidarian would still love to see the Irish superstar clash with Paul in boxing and MMA.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the flipside, I\u2019m super excited Conor is back,\u201d Bidarian said. \u201cHe\u2019s one of the most engaging characters in the sport. I think it\u2019s good for the sport. I\u2019ve said this numerous times, the biggest fight outside of Paul-[Mike] Tyson that can happen globally is Paul-McGregor.<\/p>\n
\u201cHopefully Conor is back and hopefully these two run it in boxing and MMA and we shatter records all over again. So welcome back, Conor and thank you Dana for bringing him back during the Francis Ngannou walkout.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Francis Ngannou was walking to the cage for his fight against Philipe Lins, White went live on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":676757,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,1347,785,270175,324901,85,787,1396],"class_list":["post-676756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-latest-news","tag-mma","tag-mvp-mma","tag-mvp-mma-news","tag-sports","tag-ufc","tag-ufc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/676757"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}