The UFC is currently struggling with a glaring lack of bona fide superstars.
Jon Jones simply can’t stop screwing up, Ronda Rousey isn’t coming back any time soon and it’s been almost a year since Conor McGregor took to the Octagon.
Recent pay-per-view numbers for solid fight cards made it abundantly clear that the world’s pre-eminent mixed martial arts organisation is in dire need of some reliable needle-movers.
Fortunately for the UFC, the greatest welterweight of all time will return in just over two weeks and Georges St-Pierre’s comeback fight, against the trash-talking middleweight champion Michael Bisping, will headline the card which should be the promotion’s most successful of 2017.
St-Pierre is a star, there’s no denying that, and his return could not have come a moment sooner for UFC President Dana White & Co.
And with St-Pierre and McGregor currently on the same roster, it would only make sense to pair them up at 170lbs for what could well be the biggest fight in UFC history.
White has explained what would need to happen in order to make ‘The Notorious’ vs. GSP a reality.
“GSP would need to defend his title first at 185lbs and Conor has some business to handle himself. It would be a year and a half down the road before we would even talk about that,” White told TSN, via MMAWeekly.
“Everybody’s intriguing for Conor McGregor. I mean, if you look at Conor McGregor at 145, 155 and 170lbs, everything is intriguing.”
While there are several moving parts at play, stranger things have definitely happened in combat sports than McGregor moving back up to welterweight and St-Pierre dropping down to the division he made his own for a lucrative clash.
And White has suggested that the fight, if it does come to fruition, could possibly take place in Croke Park. He commented:
“I don’t know where that would be. We could do it in Croke Park in Ireland, where there’s like 100,000 seats.
“You could do it here in Toronto, where we had 56,000 people, and you could do it in Vegas, which is always good, too.”
The biggest hurdle in the way of a McGregor fight in Croke Park has been a combination of the UFC’s tendency to cater to the American pay-per-view market and the residential curfew in place around the iconic Irish stadium.
But fingers crossed they can make it work.
