Dana White offers Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather $25m each to fight

UFC president Dana White said on Friday that he would pay $25m apiece to Floyd Mayweather Jr and and MMA star Conor McGregor for a presumed boxing match with the split of additional pay-per-view revenue between the fighters to be determined.

White’s offer, put forth on Colin Cowherd’s sports talk radio show on Fox Sports Radio, comes two days after Mayweather, the five-division champion who retired undefeated from boxing nearly a year and a half ago, said he would fight McGregor for a base purse of $100m with McGregor taking home a career-high $15m plus a minor cut of the pay-per-view receipts.

“I’ll tell you what Floyd, here’s a real offer,” White said. “I’m the only guy that can actually make the offer and I’m actually making a real offer: We’ll pay you $25 million, we’ll pay Conor $25 million and then we’ll talk about pay-per-view at a certain number. There’s a real offer.”

Mayweather, who is in New York to support Badou Jack’s bid to unify super middleweight titles against James DeGale on Saturday night, dismissed White’s offer out of hand.

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“He’s a f*****g comedian,” Mayweather said in a brief interview with TMZ.com.

Mayweather earned a guaranteed base purse of $32m for his most recent fight, a unanimous-win decision over Andre Berto in September 2015. That was down from a minimum of $100m for his previous fight against Manny Pacquiao, not including a portion of the pay-per-view revenue reported to be in the high eight-figure range.

McGregor’s highest disclosed purse in MMA is $3m. The Irishman last fought in November, when he knocked out Eddie Alvarez for the UFC lightweight title in UFC 205.

(Guardian service)