Conor McGregor has had a lot on his plate recently, but he is said to be trying to add more after rejoining the UFC’s anti-doping program with plans to return to the Octagon.
It’s been more than four years since McGregor last competed. After watching him bystander from facing Michael Chandler in 2024, he fell off the radar once again to his combat career. In the meantime, McGregor became co-owner of BKFC and launched a record label, not to mention his own beer brand, his own cigars and plans to run to become Ireland’s president.
However, UFC legend Matt Brown never bought McGregor’s miraculous return, and he’s not sure that his drug tests again are a real indication that the Irish superstar will compete again. If anything, Brown questions whether McGregor is just suffering from the harsh reality that his day of battle is already behind him.
“We don’t know him as a person,” Brown said of his latest episode about McGregor. Fighter jet vs. writer. “We don’t know him personally. We don’t know what’s going on in his life. We judge him solely on his social media. We can only judge him on social media. It’s not always true.
Part of the reason Brown can’t question where McGregor’s head is these days comes down to the struggles most fighters face as their careers approach the end.
That was something he had to deal with personally as he approached retirement, and Brown had to realize that his fighting career couldn’t be the only way he defined himself. He’s a father, business owner and more, but Brown is most identified as a fighter, and most athletes in the UFC, including McGregor, know that it’s the same.
“Every fighter knows it’s going to be your identity,” Brown said. “When you are a fighter, it’s who you are. We always talk about it with sports psychologists and other fighters. You can’t make this your identity. You’re more than that. It becomes your identity.
“If you leave the cage one day, you’ll realize that’s who you are and that’s everything you are. I think Connor is struggling with that.”
On top of that, McGregor was considered one of the sport’s highest pound fighters when he became the first two simultaneous division champion after winning both lightweight and featherweight titles. It feels like it was before and after McGregor’s final championship victory in 2016.
In his past four UFC fights dating back to 2018, McGregor holds a record 1-3 after being submitted by Khabib Nurmagomedov, knocked out by Dustin Poirier and suffers from a terrible broken leg in his third fight with Poirier.
“Now his identity has been torn apart by Dustin Poirier,” Brown explained. “Dustin took away his soul. Khabib (Nurmagomedov) was probably the first one, but Dustin put his claws in the coo on it.
“Now he’s not the winner of that identity. Now he’s not competing anymore. That’s about dealing with a lot of things for everyone. So you have to have a little sympathy on that side. That’s a lot to deal with.”
He was so successful at the peak of his career that McGregor is in a financial situation where he no longer has to fight with a boxing match with Floyd Mayweather and a sale of his whiskey company that brought him hundreds of millions of dollars.
But just as Brown agrees with the idea that having so much money could drive everyone away from the combat business, he personally believes there may be another underlying factor that people like McGregor are concerned about.
“He’s probably in a situation where he’s retired in a place like, ‘I’ve got all this money, what am I doing now?’,” Brown said. “I didn’t have that much money – I still don’t have that much money, just like I have to say out loud in case you were wondering – but I know very wealthy people who talk about it.
“Maybe it’s better to have good friends and family. Because you don’t know what to do for yourself right now. You made it. You have everything you need. You can buy what you like. You can go anywhere. There’s nothing left.”
That all leads to a number of potential problems McGregor faces, but he’s only turned 37 in the sport, whose age is his ultimate enemy.
“We can only see it on social media, and that’s everything we know about him,” Brown said. “We’re not hanging out with him, but on that side it doesn’t seem like he’s dealing with it properly or well.”