Heavyweight king Ngannou makes bombshell UFC claim

By Updates

January 25, 2022

Updates

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The UFC’s heavyweight champion has made a shocking claim about the promotion after his fight with Cyril Gane

UFC heavyweight ruler Francis Ngannou has claimed that the elite MMA promotion threatened to sue his agent for holding talks with the business partner of YouTube prankster Jake Paul just hours before he fought Cyril Gane on Saturday.

In the first defense of the crown he won by knocking out Stipe Miocic in 2021, Ngannou earned plaudits for his wrestling skills on the way to a unanimous decision over former friend Gane in the headline bout at UFC 270 in Anaheim.

Going against usual tradition amid a contract and pay dispute, however, president Dana White refused to put the belt around the champion’s waist with the Cameroonian revealing further details on the extent of the row to the MMA Hour on Monday.

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According to the 35-year-old, he was getting dressed to head to the Honda Center when agent Marquel Martin – who also received an unverified racist text on the same evening – told Ngannou that the UFC had sent an email threatening to sue.

The grounds for the legal action, says Ngannou, were that the Creative Artists Agency’s Martin had allegedly discussed the prospect of Ngannou crossing over to boxing with Nakisa Bidarian, who is Paul’s business partner, while still under a UFC contract.

“I walked into the room waiting for my manager, my coach,” Ngannou began. “And they were like, ‘Wow.’ I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ They told me they just received an email from the UFC saying they’re going to sue [Martin] for talking with this guy, Nakisa. Yeah. I’m like, ‘Who is Nakisa?'”

And while Ngannou admitted to talking about boxing with a number of people, he claims that he “wouldn’t recognize” Nakisa – a former UFC chief financial officer and current adviser to Paul as well as the co-founder of his Most Valuable Promotions firm – “if you put him in front of me”.

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Going into the fight as an underdog with some Vegas bookies, Ngannou would have been a free agent had he lost to Gane.

Through his masterclass with a torn right MCL and damaged ACL, however, a “champions clause” automatically kicked in meaning he is now under a new contract with the UFC for an additional year or three fights.

Ngannou is prepared to hold out for a full 365 days rather than compete in the octagon again, where he receives $600,000 per fight, yet his motives for this aren’t entirely financial given that he says he has turned down around $7 million as accepting such a proposal would have meant putting on more fights for White.

Above all, Ngannou wishes to stay with the UFC but also make a simultaneous foray into boxing where his counterpart Tyson Fury is interested in taking him on, which is something that the MMA promotion has never allowed its fighters to do with the exception of Conor McGregor’s one-off against Floyd Mayweather in 2017. 

“The term of the contract, everything that they put into, they hold you in captivity,” said Ngannou, who seeks his freedom as the independent contractor that UFC athletes are legally classed as.

"They know you're going to [run] out of money because they know exactly how much you're making and they know you can't go very far with that money."@francis_ngannou says UFC has ways of "forcing you to sign a new deal."