Thursday 28 April 2016 12:50, UK
Conor McGregor is no longer headlining UFC 200, but the brash Irishman continues to dominate the build-up to the event.
Jon Jones' rematch with Daniel Cormier for the light heavyweight title was officially announced as the new main event on Wednesday, with a press conference to promote the event taking place at Madison Square Garden later in the day.
McGregor was absent from the stage after being pulled from the card over his failure to fulfil media obligations but beleaguered UFC president Dana White was nonetheless forced to field multiple questions about the featherweight champion.
White maintains McGregor has only himself to blame for the cancellation of his much-anticipated rematch with Nate Diaz.
"I didn't prevent Conor from fighting at UFC 200," White said. "Everybody, if you look at [last week's] news conference... Joanna Jedrzejczyk came in from Poland. Claudia Gadelha came in from Brazil. This is what we do. This is how it works.
"I didn't prevent him from fighting at UFC 200. He knew what the deal was. I told him what the deal was. He opted to do that."
White sidestepped a question about how much of a financial loss the UFC would take for their decision to withdraw their star attraction and confirmed the company has no plans to lower the price of UFC 200 tickets.
McGregor's withdrawal has been met with disapproval by a large proportion of UFC fans and White has been acutely aware of that fact on social media by the Irishman's legions of supporters.
An indication of the McGregor's popularity is illustrated by the amount of people who tuned in to watch a live stream of the press conference for his fight with Diaz in February. That achieved a peak audience of over 360,000, while Wednesday's event topped out at just over 33,000.
To be left scrambling to announce a new main event the day tickets go on sale was not what White envisioned when he announced the card with much fanfare nearly 12 months ago.
When asked if he was disappointed by fan and media reaction to the card he has put together, White said: "We expect it to be big and it will be big."
He did reveal there could be another fight added, seemingly admitting the UFC are not unaware of the apathy in some quarters to their revised line-up.
"We just added this fight to the card and we are not done," White added.
The rift between McGregor and the UFC seems wide at the moment and White confirmed he has had no contact with the 27-year-old in recent days.
Despite this, White was adamant McGregor will be back in the octagon relatively soon, just not at UFC 200.
"Conor's going to fight again," White said. "He's going to fight at UFC 201, 202, 203, whatever the deal might be.
"Listen, 200 is the fight everybody's been looking forward to for a long time. It is what it is. The show is going to roll on and Conor's going to fight again."
