Manager: Khabib Nurmagomedov could fight GSP ‘before Tony’

After Khabib Nurmagomedov submitted Conor McGregor at UFC 229 in October, there was some discussion about him potentially crossing over to boxing to battle Floyd Mayweather in the boxing ring— just as McGregor did in 2017.

Since then, however, talk of a Khabib Nurmagomedov vs. Floyd Mayweather boxing match has almost completely fizzled out. Yet Nurmagomedov’s manager Ali Abdelaziz claims that Mayweather is still begging for the matchup.

“One thing I tell you, Floyd Mayweather, to this day, keep begging to fight Khabib,” Abdelaziz told TMZ this week. “Begging. Floyd ran out of money. I’m telling you, people reaching out to me every week about Floyd fighting Khabib. But at the end of the day, we’re not interested. For now.”

For the moment, Abdelaziz says, Nurmagomedov’s focus is glued to his UFC 242 title fight with Dustin Poirier.

“At the end of the day, we’re fighting Dustin Poirier. He’s a true number-one contender. We’ve got the guy with the cheap glasses [Tony Ferguson], ‘El Cucuy’ is next. We’ve got a lot of killers in this weight division.”

While Abdelaziz says Khabib Nurmagomedov’s next challenges will likely come in the form of established lightweight contenders, he added that the lightweight champ is still interested in a fight with Georges St-Pierre.

In fact, he believes a fight with St-Pierre could occur before a fight with Tony Ferguson.

“We’ve got my man Georges St-Pierre… He might be next too. I can see Georges fighting Khabib before Tony fight Khabib. But of course Dustin Poirier is next.”

“100%, [St-Pierre] is the number-one interest fight for him.”

While Ali Abdelaziz is maintaining interest in a fight between Georges St-Pierre and Khabib Nurmagomedov, UFC President Dana White has recently been adamant that it won’t happen — at least not in the lightweight division.

“Well there’s two things — first of all, who doesn’t love Georges St-Pierre? Love Georges St-Pierre, the best ever as far as human beings, great guy, love him. Georges St-Pierre and I had a deal, he was going to fight [Michael] Bisping at 185 pounds and if he won, he would defend the title. He bailed on that. Didn’t do it,” White told TSN recently. “So you can’t just come out and hand pick fights that you want for titles.”

“He made this deal with me that he would defend the title,” White added. “He went in and he saw Bisping as an easy fight. He fought Bisping and then you look at the guys that are behind Bisping and they’re all killers. They’re all literally killers.

“But now to come back and he wants to fight at 155 for the title. We’re not doing a goofy 165 [pound] whatever, that’s not going to happen.”

Do you think we’ll see Khabib Nurmagomedov battle stars like Georges St-Pierre and Floyd Mayweather in the future?

This article first appeared on BJPENN.COM on 7/18/2019.