UFC CEO ‘very confident’ Jose Aldo will fight Conor McGregor on July 11

Bloody Elbow 2.0 | Anton Tabuena

The plot thickens…

Just hours after Jose Aldo revealed that he would not make a final decision on fighting Conor McGregor at UFC 189 until he returns to training on Friday, UFC CEO Lorenzo Fertitta revealed that he is ‘very confident’ that the featherweight champion will step across the cage from the Irishman on July 11^th.

Aldo, who suffered a rib injury just over two weeks ahead of the highly anticipated PPV event, has adamantly stated that he would like to compete at UFC 189 and Fertitta believes that will likely be the case.

“I’m very confident [that fight will happen,]” Fertitta told Ariel Helwani. “Obviously at the end of the day we want to make sure that we deliver a great event so we had to go out and we were able to talk to Chad Mendes and he jumped right up to the plate and said absolutely. So we had to put that in place.”

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About the author

Karim Zidan

Karim Zidan is a investigative reporter and feature writer focusing on the intersection of sports and politics. He has written for BloodyElbow since 2014 and has served as an associate editor since 2016. He also writes for The New York Times and The Guardian. Karim has been invited to speak about his work at numerous universities, including Princeton, and was a panelist at the South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival and the Oslo Freedom Forum. He also participated in the United Nations counter-terrorism conference in 2021. His reporting on Ramzan Kadyrov’s involvement in MMA, much of which was done for Bloody Elbow, has led to numerous award nominations, and was the basis of an award-winning HBO Real Sports documentary.