Conor McGregor is the rare fighter whose value cannot be measured by title belts alone, and that is exactly why Khabib Nurmagomedov will forever be part of the conversation around him. McGregor’s championship résumé is unusually thin for someone with this kind of cultural pull, but that misses the point entirely. He was never just selling wins. He was selling events, attention and money on a scale the UFC had barely seen before.
The numbers tell the story without needing any decoration. In 2018, McGregor ranked No. 4 on Forbes’ highest-paid athletes list and made $99 million. By 2021, he had climbed to No. 1 with $180 million. That is not a nice little side note for a good fighter. That is proof he became a global combat-sports outlier, standing alongside names like Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, LeBron James, Roger Federer and Shohei Ohtani in the broader earnings conversation.
The business case was built in the Octagon
McGregor’s impact on the UFC’s pay-per-view business was not subtle. UFC 91 in 2008 surpassed 1 million pay-per-view buys, and UFC 100 did the same in 2009, but McGregor took that appetite and turned it into a repeatable attraction. When he fought José Aldo at UFC 194 in 2015, the event became part of the wider stretch of UFC fights that helped define a boom period in the promotion’s commercial life. By 2016, McGregor had become the UFC’s first simultaneous champion in two divisions, a milestone that cemented his place in the sport’s history even if his title run looked brief on paper.
That is the uncomfortable truth for anyone who wants to reduce him to a simple win-loss record. The man was a phenomenon. The UFC could present Randy Couture, Brock Lesnar, Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao as huge names in combat sports business, but McGregor operated in the same breath as the very biggest stars in sport. That is why he was so valuable. Not because he defended belts forever, but because he made everything around him feel bigger.
And now, with the UFC having moved on from the pay-per-view model since McGregor last fought, the scale of what he did looks even more striking. This weekend he returned to the Octagon for the first time in five years against Max Holloway at UFC 329 in Las Vegas, and that alone says plenty about his place in the sport. Even after 861 days away, even after the noise, the business and the years passing by, McGregor remains a figure who can drag attention back to the cage.
So when people ask what McGregor really meant to the UFC, the answer is simple: he was not just a champion, and he was not just a headline act. He was a commercial event in human form. Khabib Nurmagomedov may have been the man who beat him in the sport’s purest terms, but McGregor was the one who changed the size of the stage.
