You may have thought all the Floyd Mayweather vs. Khabib Nurmagomedov talk was dead and gone.
However, for good or bad, that’s just not the case. The undefeated UFC lightweight champion is scheduled to defend his title against interim champ Dustin Poirier in the main event of September 7’s UFC 242. Yet his manager, Ali Abdelaziz, offered some unique perspective on his oft-discussed potential match-up with Mayweather.
In a recent spot with TMZ Sports (via MMA Weekly), the outspoken Abdelaziz said Mayweather is supposedly broke. That’s lead him to ‘beg’ Khabib for the fight. Despite the constant calls to book the bout, Abdelaziz claims they just aren’t interested:
“Floyd Mayweather, to this day, keep begging to fight Khabib; begging. Floyd run out of money. I’m telling you, people reaching out to me every week about Floyd to fight Khabib, but at the end of the day, we’re not interested…for now.”
It’s an interesting point of view considering that Mayweather shot down talk of a rematch with Conor McGregor just last week. His reasoning was that he simply didn’t need the money after defeating the Irishman via 10th-round TKO in August 2017.
That fight would almost assuredly be bigger than ‘Money’ vs. Khabib – even if both would be huge in a mainstream attraction sense. Discussions of Mayweather vs. Khabib ramped up after the Dagestani star submitted McGregor at UFC 229 last year.
They’ve since cooled, but it still appears to be something Abdelaziz wants to keep in his back pocket. For what it’s worth, ‘The Eagle’ has no professional boxing experience and is known primarily as a grappler.
Is there truly fire behind the smoke of Mayweather vs. Khabib?
