Francis Ngannou simply walks away from UFC?

I don't think I have ever seen a situation similar to this in MMA and if you are aware of one that I can't recall I would appreciate it being pointed out. The reigning UFC heavyweight champion is simply walking away from the title that is still his as well as pretty impressive guaranteed paydays and refusing to sign again with UFC. The championship belt is simply being vacated and the people who remain will scrap for it.

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At this point we can only speculate as to what the real reason is because other than Dana White filling in the blanks for Francis, we don't actually have the real scoop about what happened. Based on what i know about White, I would say there is a very good chance that it has something to do with money as Dana has been in the spotlight quite a lot in the past few years about how the fighters are not pleased with the payouts they are being offered.

Dana White did insist that Francis Ngannou was "walking away from a record setting contract offer" indicating that Ngannou was being offered more money than any other heavyweight in the history of UFC. Now Dana is pretty good at manipulating a conversation so it is unclear whether he was saying that Francis would be paid more on average for his upcoming fights or if he was simply talking about how much Francis would be paid to fight Jon Jones, which is the next big thing in the heavyweight division.

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There is also a bunch of talk about how Ngannou wanted to get a break from his UFC exclusive contract in order to box against Tyson Fury which would almost certainly result in huge money the likes of which makes almost any UFC contract look silly in comparison.

As of right now though, we don't really know the real reasons but financial ones make sense since Ngannou has been complaining about how he is treated by the UFC for quite some time now. In January of 2022 he made his grievance public when he said that he was not being treated well and when we think about someone getting $600,000 for a single fight it seems like a lot. We need to consider that the champion was only being offered one fight a year and while yes, 600k is a lot of money, it isn't really the kind of money that we expect to see at the highest level of heavyweight fighting competition in the entire world.

I think the disallowing of him fighting in boxing during his UFC downtime might be more of a factor and he feels a bit cheated because Conor got to do it, so why can't I? There's no doubt that Dana White certainly has his favorites in the sport even under his own banner but we also need to at least recognize that Francis Ngannou doesn't have anywhere near the draw or star-power that Conor McGregor does and especially isn't a much of a money maker as The Notorious One was in his prime.

So Francis is going to throw all the toys out of the pram and walk away. I'm sure there are a lot of people that are interested and it would be interesting to see if Bellator go for it. At the moment BKFC have shown some interest but if it is money that he is after, I don't think that promotion is going to cut it.

For now Francis is remaining suspiciously quiet about this and there might be some legal reason why that is the case. If he does come out and talk about it, I am sure a lot of people would be interested to know why someone who seemed to be a rather dominant fighter and had perhaps the fight of his life coming up vs. Jon Jones would simply walk away from everything. Time will tell I guess.