November 1, 2024

James Gallagher opting to stay at 145, says he will be first to break a million PPV buys for Bellator

On Monday morning, an Instagram post from unbeaten Irish fighter James Gallagher suggested that he would stay in the featherweight ranks, just a month after he stated he would make hisbantamweight debut in Dublin.

According to the SBG submission specialist, the decision to stay at 145 was made after a discussion with his head coach, John Kavanagh.

“I was talking to John (Kavanagh) about it and he just thought it would be better for me to stay at 145 at the moment,” Gallagher told MMAFighting.com.

“When you think about it, I’ve never been overpowered at 145. The guys might look bigger than me, but they have never had a huge strength advantage on me. I feel like my attributes are better than anyone’s in the division.”

Although he is ruling out dropping down now, he said he would look to move to bantamweight in the future.

Bantamweight can come later, but right now I’m focusing on featherweight,” he said.

“For the next while, I’m staying here because there are still a lot of fights here for me. There are still a lot of guys that I want to go out and get.

“When I’m done at 145, then I’ll go to 135.”

Gallagher claims that he already has an opponent for his first Bellator main event, which takes place at Dublin’s 3 Arena on Nov. 10.

Coming off the biggest win of his career at Madison Square Garden against Chinzo Machida, ‘The Strabanimal’ is out to prove another point to Bellator.

The 20-year-old believes the Dublin date will propel him to even bigger things, and in the future, he believes that he can become the first man to generate a million pay-per-view buys for the promotion.

“This will be the real ‘Jimmy Show’. It’s going to be next level s**t,” he said.

“The whole show is going to be bigger. There are a lot of things that we’re going to do in the lead up that will make this a much bigger show than the last Bellator events that we had in Ireland.

“It’s all about me. The VIP tickets for this show sold out in two hours.

“What other 20-year-old can they do this with? I bet they wished they picked me up when I was 17 and pumped all that cash into me like they did with some other guys. Those other guys failed when they walked out, they couldn’t handle that pressure.

“In New York, I proved that I’m the fighter that they should invest in. I’m going to be the one who eventually breaks a million pay-per-view buys for Bellator.

“That’s the promotion’s goal, and I’m going to be the one who gets them there.”

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