In 2015, McGregor beat Chad Mendes in the interim featherweight championship. The bout attracted a sold-out crowd of more than 16,000 at an arena in Las Vegas.
“People don’t give him credit,” Luke Keeler, a professional boxer from Dublin, says of the win. “It was a huge impact that he made. He was dedicated and had great belief at the time.”
By then, it was clear his fame – and bank account – was reaching new heights.
One of the biggest moments in his career came later that year, when he defeated José Aldo to win the featherweight title. His first loss was against Nate Diaz in 2016. A rematch a few months later, which McGregor won, sold a record-breaking 1.6 million pay-per-view buys.
That year, on the US chat show Jimmy Kimmel Live, McGregor was asked at what age he realised he was good at fighting. “I’m Irish, we’re all good at fighting,” he told Kimmel. “Where I come from, where I grew up, you had to be aware, you had to be able to defend yourself, so that’s how I got into it.”
Back on home soil, McGregor was named Sportsperson of the Year at the RTÉ Sport Awards. Sinéad O’Carroll, an Irish journalist and editor who covered the recent trial, says this was seen as a “remarkable feat” as it happened in the same year as the Olympics and Ireland’s Euro 2016 victory over Italy.
“It was divisive though,” she adds. “Some people thought that he wasn’t so much a sportsperson, that he was more a celebrity and people looked up to him because of his attitude and his fame.
“He’s never been a very clear-cut, popular figure in Ireland, but he would have been part of that establishment, winning that award, being invited onto the Late Late Show and would have been highly regarded for his feats in the cage, if nothing else,” she says.
Carroll, the MMA journalist, says it was around this time McGregor “started showing everyone who he was”.
“It was kind of like one of those moments when you’re like, ‘oh, he is what we think he is’.”