Dana White: Fight Island, UFC 251, McGregor, Jones and Masvidal

Dana White appeared on ESPN's First Take and talked about fight island, UFC 251 and his recent scuffles with Conor McGregor, Jon Jones and Jorge Masvidal.

Dana White is getting his Fight Island. The location is Yas Island in Abu Dahbi.  The event will be UFC 251 and will feature Usman vs Burns.  The undercard has Volkanovski vs Holloway, Peter yan vs Aldo, Andrade vs Rose and Ribas vs VanZant . UFC 251 is stacked with potentially great fights.

After spilling details about Fight Island, Max Keller showed little interest and asked his thoughts on Conor McGregor, Jon Jones and Jorge Masvidal. Dana said that Conor is frustrated for not getting the fights he wants. According to White, McGregor was given the opportunity to fight at UFC 249 and replace Khabib or Tony but he turned it down. Dana then said "He (Conor) came back and said ‘I’m not a replacement fighter, I’m not going to do it." Gaethje was the one who stepped in and therefore, he got to fight Khabib. We can all agree, Dana White is right.

Regarding Jones, Dana said that Jones and Masvidal both signed deals less than a year ago. Jones has 8 fights on his contract. ESPN host Domonique Foxworth, to his credit, pressed White on the money issue. Which is the main satisfaction among many UFC fighters. White responded. "Does anybody feel like they're making too much money?". Foxworth then said that as an athlete, he understands the need for fighters to unionize.   White did not want to go there but explained the tough position in which businesses are due to COVID-19 and said at the end "I have 630 fighters under contract and we are talking about two".

We don't know the details of these contracts. It seems that it's mainly an agreement on the number of bouts the athletes are agreeing to fight and not how much money they are getting for each fight.  Masvidal said in a tweet that he's getting less money for a championship fight than his last fight against Diaz. Jones is in a similar position. He argues that he should get more money if he were to fight Ngannou in a higher weight division.

Fight island sounds pretty cool and everyone is talking about it. However, the most pressing issue for the UFC right now is the dissatisfaction that many of its stars are feeling. It's a tug of war between fighters and bosses. Only time will tell who comes up victorious.