Dana White to Mayweather: I’ll pay you ‘25 million’ to box Conor McGregor in UFC

A potential boxing bout between UFC megastar Conor McGregor and undefeated boxing legend Floyd Mayweather Jr. is now serious business.

There had been talks of a superfight between the two athletes for the better part of a year, but discussion heated up when Mayweather offered ‘The Notorious’ $15 million to accept a boxing match on Wednesday.

MMA Fighting’s Ariel Helwani has also reported that a Mayweather-McGregor showdown has gone from ‘pipe dream phase’ to ‘exploratory phase’, and it appears the two parties could be in serious negotiations.

The UFC president himself, Dana White, made an offer of his own on Colin Cowherd’s “The Herd” on Friday, claiming that he would be willing to pay the 39-year-old Mayweather $25 million to fight under the UFC banner.

“I’ll tell you what Floyd, here’s a real offer, and I’m the guy who can actually make the offer, and I’m actually making a real offer,” White said, per MMA Fighting’s Danny Segura. “We’ll pay you 25 million, we’ll pay Conor 25 million, and then well talk pay-per-view and a certain number. There is a real offer.”

It’s expected that the fight would be contested under boxing rules, but White plans to stack the card with a series of high-profile MMA bouts.

“If we did Conor McGregor vs. Floyd Mayweather, there would be another championship bout as the co-main event and a stacked card just like we did in New York,” White continued. “And when the show was over, people would leave at least, whether they went to the event or bought it on pay-per-view, feeling like they got their money’s worth.”

White believes that, if the fight did come together, it would rival Mayweather-Pacquiao pay-per-view numbers, which shattered 4.6 million PPV buys and generated a revenue of over $400 million in 2015.

“When you look at think like this you have to take an educated guess at the possible pay per view, but I would be disappointed if a Conor McGegor vs. Floyd Mayweather match didn’t do over two million, 2.3 to 2.5 million, but the the upside could be, who knows, maybe what Mayweather, Manny Paquiao did.”