The facade around odious McGregor should have collapsed years ago

Conor McGregor has been silent in the past few days, which is somewhat out of character for a man whose social media feed serves as a reliable, unfiltered sewage pipe to his many followers.

We might choose to trawl back to Sunday, when he reposted a video on X in which he explained his withdrawal from the race to become president of Ireland. It shaped into a rant about the ‘undemocratic process’ before McGregor briefly offered a concession that he may, indeed, be carrying a ‘bit of baggage’ at the minute.

Later, he shared a different video, this time detailing how ‘otherworldly superstardom’ nearly broke him, and then uploaded a montage of images from a bareknuckle fighting show he had promoted. Busy fingers, busy mouth.

But that all stopped with a post on Monday: ‘Hey folks online, I’m out of here for a bit, see you again soon!’

The abruptness might be explained by what we learned from elsewhere on Tuesday, when it emerged McGregor’s long-teased plans for a first fight in four years had hit a snag – he has been banned for 18 months for his failure to take three drugs tests in 2024.

The announcement, made by the UFC, carried a tone that was curiously sympathetic in light of the implications around drug use in combat sport. It noted McGregor’s cooperation with the investigation and used that, along with his undisclosed explanations for missing the tests on June 13, September 19 and September 20, as justification for shaving six months of their standard punishment for the offence.

There was also a line in the statement that McGregor was ‘recovering from an injury and was not preparing for an upcoming fight at the time’, which was mildly intriguing, as it appeared to contradict something I found in an interview given by the UFC president, Dana White, on September 19 of 2024 – the day of the second missed test. 

Referencing a conversation he had with his most marketable asset the night before, White said: ‘He’s in New York right now and he’s training.’

So that stands as just one mystery within the enigma of Conor McGregor, a fighter whose sporting disgrace has belatedly started to play catch-up with the stink he has generated in the wider world, which has included rape allegations that he denies.

Is he among the most odious characters in sport? For me, that was secured long before he missed any tests.

With an acquired fortune estimated north of £150million, there was a time when he was utterly captivating. Ahead of his crossover fight with Floyd Mayweather in 2017, for which he was paid in the region of £60m, I travelled to Dublin in attempt to understand the McGregor phenomenon.

It had been unashamedly built on his charisma and bluster as well as his talent for mixed martial arts, of course, but beneath his words, many of which were either obscene or absurd, there was a fascinating story.

It is all well known by this point – the apprentice plumber whose UFC debut in 2013 was preceded by a trip to collect his €188 dole cheque. By the time he fought Mayweather, he was a two-time world champion and had a speedboat named 188.

I enjoyed learning about McGregor, who was described to me by those who knew him as having always been ‘full of it’, but also quite fun. It feels like a misadventure down the garden path all these years on, but back then McGregor was easier to buy into.

One of his female gym partners described a fighter who would pinch her fragrant shampoos and conditioners, before prancing around in a tiny towel.

She also detailed his use of self-help books and a former coach spoke about the unconventional videos he would receive at late hours of the night from his guy – one featured a pair of gorillas wrestling in the wild and was accompanied by an enquiry over whether the techniques could be applied in the octagon.

There was plenty of that knockabout stuff in the piece I wrote, which included an interview with a Lithuanian journeyman who had beaten McGregor in the early days and by then was working as a pawnbroker. He recalled McGregor breaking down in tears that night and was as amazed as anyone by what he went on to achieve.

That McGregor is now serving a drugs ban is a familiar issue in fight sports. So is the likelihood that it will only serve to increase his notoriety and marketability – conveniently, his backdated suspension will be cleared in time to take his place on a UFC card slated for the lawn of Donald Trump’s White House on June 14 of next year, the President’s 80th birthday.

McGregor has previously stated his demand of $100m (£75m) for such an engagement and 100 of Trump’s gold visas to pass on to his family and friends for permanent residence. This from a man who has fought only four times since 2016, but within combat crowds a bit of absence usually makes the heart grow fonder.

And yet McGregor is certainly a strange destination for one’s affections. His phenomenon made way for lucidity around his appalling nature long ago.

Aside from pub brawls, a wild act of vandalism on a rival fighter’s bus and homophobic slurs towards a different athlete in past years, 2025 has seen him lodged in an ongoing battle against claims that could eventually define him above all else.

In July, he lost an appeal over a civil court ruling last year that awarded damages to a woman who accused him of rape in 2018. McGregor, who has been with his long-term fiancee Dee Devlin for 17 years, and with whom he has four children, insisted the sex with Nikita Hand was ‘fully consensual’.

Much of that scrutiny was in place while he was staging his surreal, now-aborted, bid for the Irish presidency. Remarkably, his animated campaigning against immigration landed him the endorsement of Trump, whom he visited in the Oval Office on St Patrick’s Day in March.

Elon Musk also threw himself behind the kind of guy who, in 2019, punched a 50-year-old in a Dublin bar for refusing to drink a free shot of his whisky brand.

Ireland’s foreign minister Simon Harris struck a different tone in describing McGregor last month, as a figure who ‘represents the worst of us’.

As the fighter processes his drugs ban in silence, it is easy for a variety of reasons to side with Harris.