After UFC 270 the battle of Francis Ngannou vs. the UFC is FAR from over.
Ngannou retained his UFC heavyweight championship this past Saturday night at UFC 270 in Anaheim, CA against interim heavyweight champion Ciryl Gane. However, the fight was met with nothing but challenges. In fact, UFC President Dana White was pissed about the outcome of Ngannou winning, and if you don't know why you should read into why that's the case.
Now we've learned that the UFC wanted to play a little dirty. Just hours before the fight took place, apparently the UFC sent an email to Ngannou's manager Marquel Martin saying that they are being sued. The lawsuit alleges that Martin had been in contact with Nakisa Bidarian, who is the business partner of Jake Paul and the co-founder of Paul's Most Valuable Promotions.
Ironically, both Bidarian and Martin are former employees of the UFC. Martin used to work in the UFC's marketing department and Bidarian was the former Chief Financial Officer of the UFC and was around when the UFC sold the company back in 2016 for $4 billion. Needless to say that White has been publicly slandering both of these men as of late, so it seems as though the company isn't fond of the idea of the two teaming up.
Ngannou revealed this when he appeared on Ariel Helwani's The MMA Hour on Monday after his victory.
https://youtu.be/lEur5EyTVvI?t=2080
Although Ngannou has been vocal about his desire to box and the fact that he is willing to walk away from the UFC if they can't come to terms on a new deal, he claims that he has no idea who Bidarian is.
White has been specifically going after Martin a lot lately, claiming that Ngannou "has terrible representation" despite the fact that Ngannou has never been a bigger mainstream name. In fact, Martin posted on his Instagram a screenshot of a text he received from the Las Vegas area code on the morning of the fight.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CZCUlZlFRwe/
Now of course we can't automatically allege that this is White or anybody else from the UFC, but it's hard to understand who else would have any sort of motive to message Ngannou's management team something like this.
This is a developing story, so we'll have to see where things go from here. However there's no question that the UFC was playing a little dirty here and was trying to throw in distractions right before the biggest fight of the team's life.
We can only wait and see where this goes from here and if anything comes of it, but make no mistake that there is no coincidence in the lawsuit email being sent to the team just hours before the fight took place.
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