The UFC President finally addresses why Brock Lesnar turned down a Heavyweight title match against Daniel Cormier; Ever since the former Heavyweight champion entered the octagon and shoved the newly crowned champ at UFC 226, it was expected that Brock Lesnar would face Daniel Cormier for the prestigious belt.
Fast forward to WrestleMania 35, where ‘The Beast Incarnate’ dropped the Universal Championship to Seth Rollins, it was heavily expected for Lesnar to leave the company to go on to face Cormier, with Ariel Helwani reporting that the match-up was being set to take place in August. However, Dana White surprisingly revealed that Lesnar decided to retire instead. Cormier will now have a rematch against Stipe Miocic at UFC 241.
Speculation on the current WWE superstar opting to not return to the octagon stemmed from financial reasons, which White confirms himself; however, it’s not due to the pay-per-view broadcasts now under the ESPN network and the financial incentives not being great. It all stems from Vince McMahon simply out bidding the UFC President (transcript courtesy of mmafighting.com) :
“Brock Lesnar got a better deal is basically what happened for Brock.”
White waved off the notion that Lesnar and Conor McGregor have refused to fight because of the financial restraints that reportedly exists now because the pay-per-view structure for the company has changed:
“That’s absolutely false,” White said.
“And if you really look when we were on pay-per-view, we were on traditional pay-per-view, everybody was talking about how the pay-per-view business was dying. It’s dying and nobody can pull numbers anymore.
“Really? We were still pulling five to seven million pay-per-view buys a year when we were on the dying, traditional pay-per-view. You can’t listen to any of this noise.”