Chael: McGregor called the bluff of the wrong guys

Retired UFC fighter and current color commentator, podcaster, and all around MMA personality Chael Sonnen discussed Conor McGregor’s retirement tweet, and subsequent pulling from UFC 200.

“I don’t have any inside info on this. Just being around the business since the 90’s, I know how it works,” said Sonnen, as transcribed by Jed Meshew for MMA Fighting. “I know how this whole thing went down. And if I tell you what I think, I guarantee I’m 98 percent right if not 100.

“Conor had a deal with the UFC. And Conor’s now going back and trying to renegotiate and it just doesn’t work that way. It can’t. You can’t write everything down, you can’t get your contracts done all the time in this business. There’s 500 guys under contract. There’s not even that many employees in the UFC. I think there’s like 340 employees with 500 fighters. There’s 53 shows scheduled for a year that only has 52 weeks in the year. You have to be able to make a phone call, count on whatever the guy says, hang up the phone and that’s the end of it. You have to be able to do that.

“Conor has a contract, he made a deal, somewhere he didn’t sign it. Let the promotion go out, let the money get spent and then realized ‘I’ve got the upper hand. Now I can come back and renegotiate. Who’s going to tell me no when the advertising is already done?’ That’s what he did. Guaranteed. With no inside knowledge, guaranteed that’s what happened.”

“He might really be done…I don’t know if he wants to be done. This was a negotiation tool. But he called the bluff of the wrong guys. These are gamblers man, there’s rules in Vegas. If you say bet you have a bet. I mean that. You go to a casino, you don’t put your money down, you tell the pit boss ‘I want that bet’ if he yells the word bet you have a bet. And it goes both ways. If you win it he’ll pay you…Anytime you go into a negotiation and you call someone’s bluff, man you better mean it because this is what can happen.”

“When you get beat up by a guy, and then you agree to fight him again, and then you pull out, it really doesn’t matter after that. And the miscalculation here by Conor is he’s not gonna be telling his side. He’s gonna be telling his side to whoever.com. He’s not gonna be telling it on FS1 or ESPN or anywhere else. Those days are gone. This was a big mistake.”

“Who’s a good replacement for Conor? I guarantee you Georges St.-Pierre’s phone is blowing up right now and he’s getting a big offer. That’s the guy they’re gonna go after.”

“This is the biggest UFC of all time and sometimes that’s a fun thing to say for promotional reasons, but it is. When you talk about the ratings, when you talk about the biggest show of all time nobody ever even brings up UFC 100 because it was such an anomaly and the numbers were so crazy that you just throw it out. It’s like a curve in school. So UFC 200 you would have to imagine would be that big. He was sitting on top of the bill and this is done. The commercials are out. There’s a lot of money that’s already spent. There’s a lot of billboards that are already up….I’ve known Dana since 2005. He’s not putting a patch in this boat. Conor could call him right now, he’s not patching up UFC 200.”

If McGregor is genuinely retired – few feel that is the case – he would become on the eighth champion to vacate the belt for non-injury issues, after Randy Couture, Bas Rutten, Frank Shamrock, Murilo Bustamante, B.J. Penn, Georges St-Pierre, and Jens Pulver. However, McGregor would be the first one to do so coming off a loss.