Conor McGregor has been told his UFC fights no longer generate the huge interest they once did.
The former two-weight champion is undoubtedly the biggest star in MMA history, with almost the entire top 10 highest selling pay-per-view events featuring the Dubliner in the headline spot.
But McGregor lost three of his last four bouts, and injuries as well as coronavirus restrictions have cost him the ability to stay consistent over the last four years, reports The Mirror.
He moved over to boxing to face Floyd Mayweather in a crossover fight which earned him over $100million, and in his return to the octagon he broke the UFC PPV record against Khabib Nurmagomedov at UFC 229.
But since those two fights, both of which saw him stopped, he's fought three times in two years, winning just one against Donald 'Cowboy' Cerrone in 2020.
And former Bellator world champion and top UFC contender Ben Askren has warned the Irishman that he is losing his ability to generate major interest in his fights.
"When McGregor was competing for UFC titles, there was so much hype around him," Askren told MMA Island.
"And now a McGregor fight is still a big fight but it's not the same thing that it was, right?
"I mean we're thinking when he's getting ready to fight Jose Aldo or Eddie Alvarez, those fights were just so gigantic and nowadays lost, three or four maybe or four or five, something like that.
"People will be excited for the next Conor McGregor fight but they are not going to be as excited as they were back then."
It's a theory that has been thrown around since he made his return after almost a year-and-a-half out of action to face Cerrone in January of 2020.
Speculation was rife in the MMA community that McGregor had begun to damage his draw after a series of controversies outside the octagon.
But his fight against Cerrone, which for all intents and purposes was a tune-up fight that lasted under a minute, became a massive-selling PPV hit.
It sold a reported 1.3million PPV buys, essentially neck-and-neck with the hastily arranged world title bout between Kamaru Usman and Jorge Masvidal months later.
And his two rematches with Dustin Poirier last year were also huge hits, both landing in the top five highest sellers of all time list, even after McGregor was knocked out for the first time at UFC 257.
Askren was a big star during his day, but was past his peak when he arrived in the UFC in 2019, going 1-2 before returning to retirement, where he had been prior to getting the call.
He was an undefeated world champion in Bellator and ONE FC, but despite winning his debut in the UFC, eventually he was beaten by first Masvidal and then Demian Maia.
Most recently, he took a boxing match with Jake Paul in April, and was stopped within the first round by the YouTube star in a PPV event that reportedly sold 1.5m units.
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