Dana White Refuses To Book Conor McGregor Before January 23

Conor McGregor and Dustin Poirier have been itching for a second encounter inside the Octagon and UFC President Dana White has offered a date for the potential encounter and refuses to budge.

White says that McGregor has been offered the date of January 23 for the rematch with Poirier.

“We offered him a fight. We got him his own date,” White told Brett Okamoto of ESPN. “We didn’t have a date this year. We have everything laid out for this year, with world champions fighting for titles. He wants to fight Dustin Poirier apparently, so we went to [broadcast partner] ESPN and got him his own date. He’s been offered Dustin Poirier on Jan. 23. It’s a yes or no answer.”

McGregor had been adamant about fighting Poirier by the end of this year and thus far, no answer has been given for White’s offer of January 23. The reason White says the January 23 date was offered to McGregor is that the promotion has a lot of fights lined up for the rest of this year and didn’t want to move them.

“That’s not how it works,” White said. “We laid out this year. He was retired. Would anybody disagree he was retired? Through this crazy pandemic year we’re going through, we faced a lot of challenges. There were a lot of things done to make this thing work. We made it happen. We have our schedule laid out. Fighters have committed to it. Fighters have started training for these fights. Conor came back and wants to fight Dustin, so we went out and got him his own date. It’s Jan. 23.”

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