As Conor McGregor said this past week on “The Tonight Show,” six years ago he was working as a plumber’s apprentice in Ireland while training and fighting in low-level matches that paid little. For several years in his early and mid-20s, McGregor earned maybe 100 euros per fight (a little over $100), and he was collecting welfare payments to get by.
“His annual earnings for that five-year period was something like €1,500 a year!” McGregor’s trainer, John Kavanaugh, told the Independent in 2016. “There was no money and I was running out of ideas. The UFC was a closed shop. There were no opportunities and he had one foot out the door.”
The UFC signed Conor McGregor up for his first match with the company in 2013, and his rise to become the biggest and richest UFC fighter was remarkably quick. He was crowned the UFC featherweight champion and named“Fighter of the Year” in 2015.
As UFC revenues soared, so did the earnings of its highest-profile fighters. McGregor made an estimated $10 million in 2015 and somewhere between $20 million to $40 million in 2016, according to Forbes. Then came McGregor’s switch to an even bigger stage in the 2017 boxing match against Floyd Mayweather, when McGregor made somewhere between $85 million to $100 million.
In 2018, Conor McGregor had only a single fight, the October 6 UFC main event against Khabib Nurmagomedov. It was the third biggest pay-per-vew event in history, and McGregor earned a flat $3 million for the fight plus an undisclosed portion of pay-per-view sales. Prior to the fight, UFC President Dana White said McGregor could make upwards of $100 million for that single match.
While it’s unclear exactly how much money Conor McGregor has made fighting before his retirement announcement, his gross career earnings easily top $200 million.
•Culled from Money.com