In the past, Conor McGregor has spoken regarding his ambition to partner with the UFC.
On Friday night's Off The Ball, Bleacher Report's Jeremy Botter - a well-connected UFC writer - told of what he believes is McGregor's ambition to go a step even further than that.
Botter thinks it is the Dubliner's ultimate goal to leave the UFC and go solo in terms of putting on fights.
Conor has never wanted to be a cog in the wheel. If you're in the UFC, you're a cog in the wheel. You're just another part of the machine, you're expendable, you get what they give you even if you get to a level where Conor has gotten to. You're only going to get a certain amount of the money. You're never going to get 100 per cent of the profits.
Conor McGregor wants to be the wheel. That's been his dream from the beginning. He doesn't want to just make a lot of money. He wants to make all of the money and he is following that boxing model and actually one thing that hasn't been publicised much is a year ago, he actually trademarked the term McGregor Sports and Entertainment and his girlfriend Dee Devlin is actually the president of that company in Dublin. He is already laying the ground work for this. I believe his time in the UFC is limited. I'm not saying he's going to be out of the UFC this year or next year. But I do believe he has a set amount of fights left that he wants to do with the UFC and then at that point he is going to go out on his own.
One of those fights, according to Botter, could be the oft-mentioned Croke Park event.
His intention honestly is to do Croke Park on his own. He wants to do that fight in Croke Park, the UFC are never going to do it just because of the timezone difference and how much cost it would represent to put on a pay-per-view in the afternoon and other parts of the world in order to make it prime time there. The UFC are never going to do it, so Conor McGregor is going to do it. Conor McGregor could probably fill Croke Park on his own, even without the UFC brand.
Interestingly, during an interview with McGregor last year, Botter was questioned by the fighter about what kind of traffic his stories were getting.
In terms of the featherweight champion's ambitions beyond the fight game, it is certainly a telling anecdote.
He knows website metrics. When I did that story on him for CNN last year, he wanted to know detailed metrics of my story - which obviously we don't give to our story subjects - but it was fascinating to me that he was requesting that sort of thing. He keeps on top of everything and that gives him.
Botter, who broke the story about McGregor's fight with Rafael dos Anjos four days before it was announced, also had some information regarding the 27-year-old's new contract with the UFC.
He's on a new contract now that kicked in after the Jose Aldo fight. I'm told that he's making between $16m and $18 per fight. So you're looking at five fights, six fights left in the UFC and I think at that point he leaves. This is all predicated on him winning.
Picture credit: Ramsey Cardy / SPORTSFILE
