One would have thought they would have pushed the boat out a bit more with this one.
The ‘Champ Champ’ against the UFC’s undisputed lightweight champion. Conor McGregor’s return to the UFC after 23 months away. Supreme striker versus expert wrestler.
The UFC are expecting the October 6 bout between McGregor and current champion Khabib Nurmagomedov to be their biggest ever pay-per-view event.
The fight has been on the top of many fans’ wish-lists for years now and the bus attack at the Barclays Center, in early April, has added to the excitement levels for the bout at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
The promotion’s poster should add to that sense of anticipation and be something that portrays the magnitude of the event. Something along the lines of this class ‘Bosslogic’ depiction:
That was drafted when McGregor was still laying claim to the featherweight and lightweight belts (hence McGregor and his tiger carrying the gold) but it is pretty damn epic, all the same.
McGregor was a fan before he was a UFC fighter and he knows all about the history of major event posters. Ahead of his UFC 197 fight with Rafael Dos Anjos (before the Brazilian was replaced by Nate Diaz), ‘The Notorious’ declared:
“This is a super-fight. I look up at that poster, I see myself tucked in the back there. I see a guy whose last gate was 1.7 million. He (Dos Anjos) fought on free TV. He’s never brought a dime to the company. He’s never made a dime yet he is sitting there on the front of my poster.
“I think I might have to go into that department because they must be getting comfortable in the poster department. They’d want to get their act together and do their damn job.
“Posters are a significant part of the sport’s history. Look through the years at all the great historic posters that the UFC has produced. I feel someone’s sleeping on the job in that department and I will have to dip my nose, find out who and eliminate them.”
Almost three years on from this…
… the UFC has come up with this for the lightweight title fight.
Your OFFICIAL #UFC229 poster is here! pic.twitter.com/s5q4Ot8ICu
— UFC (@ufc) August 23, 2018
We don’t expect McGregor to be enamoured.
