MMA-turned-boxer Francis Ngannou is eager to face Jon Jones, but he doubts whether that will ever happen.
Ngannou had a good run at the UFC and won the heavyweight championship title, but he soon made a decision to leave. However, he and White didn’t part on good terms. After he departed from UFC, Ngannou went to PFL, where he had two boxing matches against top boxers Tyson Fury, Oleksandr Usyk, and Anthony Joshua. The fighter lost his two boxing matches and returned to MMA for the Battle of the Giants, where he defeated Renan Fereira in the first round. Although the fighter has nothing to prove, he says his dream matchup is against Jon Jones, but he is unsure if Dana White will allow this happen.
“If you can get past Dana White, it could happen, [but] that’s a massive obstacle,” Ngannou told Sportsbook Review about a fight with Jones. “But personally, I don’t care. I’m doing well. I’m doing my stuff at my pace. I don’t care. That won’t change my sleep for me.
“Finishing my career without fighting Jon Jones would be OK. I have tried to fight Jon Jones for four years since I fought Jairzinho Rozenstruik [at UFC 249] back in 2020. I’ve been trying to fight Jon Jones, and then they were holding it out like a trap until the moment that I was about to leave, and then they said, ‘OK, here’s the Jon Jones fight.’ But it was bait. I felt they were very tricky.”
“Yes, Jon Jones would be a great fight, a fantastic fight,” Ngannou said. “I have always hoped for that fight (but) my hope and my expectation for that fight has faded over time. …
“I have a lot of fights to get a measurement of his light heavyweight career and I have way less to look at with him as a heavyweight. I think he’s by far the best light heavyweight. His cage time as a light heavyweight was over a decade. At heavyweight he has two fights. He has barely done three rounds.”
Although Ngannou believes White is the only obstacle between him and Jones, former MMA fighter and middleweight title challenger Chael Sonnen disagrees. He said a fight between the two heavyweight champs was initially supposed to occur before Ngannou moved to PFL.
“Poor Francis was in a world title fight, in the fight capital of the world, in the world’s biggest promotion, where he is going to headline. He was not the champion of the world. He wanted to be and was going to be given that opportunity. Do you understand? Okay. Because it was at that time that it had already been announced by Dana White, this giant obstacle, that when Jon Jones returns to heavyweight, it will be for the belt.
“So now we don’t, now we don’t only have an obstacle, it doesn’t even fully have to do with Francis. Francis didn’t even have the belt. He was scheduled to fight Stipe, a fight that Francis had already lost. Like, we didn’t know who the champion was going to be, but whoever it was going to be, we were going to stick to the deal and the plan that when Jon comes up, Jon will contest with that person. It’s important that you understand that, because that one detail, in and of itself, that timeline excludes the possibility that Francis was being picked on.
“It was an open statement that Jon will contend whenever Jon comes back, if he ever comes back, right into a world title fight. That happened to be Francis. And what happened next? Jon came back. So now we have Jon, and we have Francis, and we’re going to get to see Jon versus Francis. People are talking about it. You’re talking about it. Dana’s already announced it’s going to happen.”
Sonnen explains that the only reason Ngannou’s “dream” fight will not come to fruition is a result of Nagnnou’s doing not UFC CEO Dana White.
“But somebody blinked. That somebody, I would view to be the obstacle in this equation. Do you agree? Because that somebody was not Dana White. That somebody was not Jon Jones. As a matter of fact, Dana White went through with the plan exactly as he had previously stated, which is that Jon went right into a title fight. And it’s important that you understand this, because Francis left. So to make believe now that you wanted to do something, when you were in a position to do it, and so now the only thing stopping this fight is Dana White.”
