Cut Him Loose: Cejudo Says UFC Should Release McGregor Instead of Paying for His Last Fight

It is the kind of suggestion that would have sounded absurd a few years ago. Now, coming from a former two-division champion, it sounds like a business argument — and that is exactly how Henry Cejudo meant it. Speaking on this week's episode of Pound 4 Pound, the podcast he co-hosts with Kamaru Usman, Cejudo said the UFC should cut Conor McGregor loose now instead of paying him for the one fight remaining on his contract. McGregor has said he will move to bare-knuckle boxing with BKFC, where he is a part-owner, once his UFC deal is done. Cejudo's advice to the promotion: do not pay for the farewell. "If I'm a businessman and I want to keep a lot of my money, I would cut him," Cejudo said. "Let him be a free agent. Let him make more money elsewhere, but let him not make money or take money from us." The figure at the heart of his argument is a reported $30 million purse for McGregor's final contracted bout — a number Cejudo cited and MMA Mania has previously reported for his last outing, though UFC purses are not officially disclosed and no source confirms $30 million for the final fight itself. Cejudo's point is not really about the exact number. It is about what the UFC gets for it now. The promotion's seven-year, $7.7 billion rights deal with Paramount+, which began in January 2026, ended pay-per-view in the United States. The UFC now collects a fixed fee, so a McGregor headliner no longer brings in per-buy revenue the way it once did. That changes the calculation completely, in Cejudo's telling. McGregor is 1-4 in the UFC since his 2017 boxing match with Floyd Mayweather, and his comeback at UFC 329 on July 11 — his first fight in five years — ended after just 69 seconds when he injured his leg in the rematch with Max Holloway. Cejudo acknowledged McGregor remains a draw at the gate, with UFC 329 generating a reported $26 million live, and that the promotion has built stars off his name. But a gate is not a pay-per-view buy rate, and under the new model the UFC is paying a fortune for a headliner whose biggest commercial weapon no longer fires. "I guarantee, I'm going to tell you right now, I can even see the UFC just letting him go based on what he got paid," Cejudo said. "They could be like, 'Hey, you know what? You've got one fight left. We don't think you're worth that. You're a free agent.'" There is a second voice in the story, and it is not reassuring for McGregor either. BKFC founder and president David Feldman told talkSPORT that McGregor's bare-knuckle debut is not guaranteed — he will have to look good in his last UFC bout first. So the path McGregor has talked about is not a certainty, and the final UFC fight Cejudo wants cancelled is, in Feldman's telling, something of an audition. As of Friday, McGregor has not publicly responded to Cejudo's suggestion, and no timeline has been set for his final UFC appearance. He has said he plans to complete the last bout of his contract in 2027. Whether the UFC agrees to pay for it, or takes Cejudo's advice and lets its biggest star walk away for free, is now one of the more interesting business questions in the sport.