On 10 July 2021, Conor McGregor’s leg snapped in the closing seconds of the first round at UFC 264. He did not fight again until 11 July 2026.
That is 1,827 days — five years and one day. To put it in perspective: the gap between McGregor’s UFC debut in 2013 and his boxing superfight with Floyd Mayweather in 2017, the stretch that contained his entire rise to global superstardom, was shorter than his layoff.
Most people assume it was the leg. The leg was only the first reason.
Why Didn’t Conor McGregor Fight for Five Years?
Conor McGregor didn’t fight between 2021 and 2026 because of four separate obstacles that stacked on top of each other: a broken tibia and fibula suffered at UFC 264 that took years to fully rehabilitate; a broken toe that cancelled his 2024 comeback against Michael Chandler two weeks out; an 18-month anti-doping suspension for three missed drug tests, backdated to September 2024; and a civil court case in Ireland that ran alongside all of it. Any one of them would have cost him a year. Together they cost him half a decade.
Here’s how each one played out.
1. The Leg Break (July 2021)
McGregor entered UFC 264 already carrying a stress fracture — a detail fans didn’t learn until afterwards.
It was the third fight of his trilogy with Dustin Poirier, and the second in six months, following a knockout loss to the same man in January 2021. The opening round was frantic. McGregor had moments, but as Poirier pressured him late in the round, McGregor stepped backwards, rolled his ankle onto the existing fracture, and his lower leg gave way.
He collapsed on the canvas at T-Mobile Arena, and the doctor waved it off between rounds. A TKO loss, his second straight to Poirier.
The tibia and fibula were both broken. McGregor later admitted he thought his career might be finished on the spot.
Recovery from a double lower-leg break is measured in years, not months, for a professional athlete who needs to plant, pivot and kick on it. Within hours, McGregor was publicly promising to come back better than ever. In reality, he would not be cleared to fight for a very long time.
2. The Broken Toe That Killed the Chandler Fight (June 2024)
By 2024, the leg had healed. McGregor was finally booked.
He was set to headline UFC 303 on 29 June 2024 against Michael Chandler — a fight the UFC had built for the better part of a year, with the two men coaching opposite each other on The Ultimate Fighter season 31.
Then, roughly two weeks out, it collapsed. In a sparring session without full protective gear, McGregor kicked his training partner and broke his little toe. He posted the photo. The fight was scrapped, and Alex Pereira vs Jiří Procházka was slotted in as the replacement main event.
It was, as McGregor himself has pointed out, the only time in his career he has ever pulled out of a UFC fight.
The Chandler fight was never rebooked. Chandler eventually gave up waiting and fought Charles Oliveira instead. McGregor’s comeback, which everyone assumed was months away, evaporated — and the wait stretched on for another two years.
3. The Anti-Doping Suspension (Revealed October 2025)
This is the part most casual fans don’t know about, and it’s the reason the layoff ran to five years rather than four.
In October 2025 it emerged that McGregor was serving an 18-month suspension for three anti-doping “whereabouts failures” — missed tests, essentially, where an athlete in the testing pool cannot be located for a scheduled sample.
The ban was backdated to September 2024, with the final whereabouts failure occurring after the Chandler fight fell through. That made him eligible to compete again from around March 2026.
There was also a structural hurdle underneath it. A fighter who has been out of the testing pool has to re-enter it and remain in it for a required window before they can be booked. Even once he was willing and healthy, McGregor was not immediately available.
In June 2026, the New York Times published an investigation alleging McGregor had used banned substances during his recovery from the leg break. McGregor has denied wrongdoing.
Whatever your view of it, the mechanical fact is simple: for a large chunk of 2024 and 2025, Conor McGregor was not legally permitted to fight.
4. The Court Case (November 2024)
Running in parallel was a civil case in Ireland.
In November 2024, a civil jury in Dublin found that McGregor had sexually assaulted a woman, Nikita Hand, in a Dublin hotel in 2018. He was ordered to pay her almost €250,000 in damages. McGregor testified that the encounter was consensual and has consistently denied the allegations. He appealed the verdict, and in 2025 the appeal was dismissed.
The commercial fallout was immediate — Proper No. Twelve, the whiskey brand he had helped build, publicly disassociated from him.
The case didn’t formally bar him from competing. But a fighter in the middle of a high-profile civil trial, with sponsors walking away, is not a fighter a promotion rushes to put in a main event.
5. And Then There Was Everything Else
McGregor was never idle. He simply wasn’t fighting.
Across the five years he sold his stake in Proper No. Twelve in a deal reported to be worth hundreds of millions, made his acting debut in the 2024 Road House remake, took a stake in Bare Knuckle FC, and at one point publicly floated running for the Irish presidency, saying his focus had shifted away from competition.
He had also, crucially, already won. McGregor was the first simultaneous two-division UFC champion and had banked generational money from the Mayweather fight in 2017. The financial pressure that drags most fighters back into the cage simply wasn’t there.
When a man is that rich, that injured, that legally entangled, and that famous, the surprising thing isn’t that he took five years. It’s that he came back at all.
The Numbers Behind the Layoff
| Metric | Figure |
| Days between UFC 264 and UFC 329 | 1,827 |
| Last UFC win | Donald Cerrone, UFC 246, January 2020 |
| Wins in his last four fights | 1 |
| Age on return | 37 (turned 38 three days later) |
| Professional record on return | 22–6 |
| UFC debut to Mayweather fight, for comparison | 1,603 days — shorter than the layoff |
That last row is the one that should stop you. McGregor’s entire ascent — the Aldo knockout, the Diaz duology, the two belts, the Mayweather payday — happened in less time than he subsequently spent on the sidelines.
Why Did He Come Back Now?
Three things lined up in 2026.
His suspension expired in March. The leg was long healed. And the UFC’s move to Paramount had voided his old pay-per-view-based contract, forcing a renegotiation that gave him a reason to sit back down at the table. (We covered that shift in detail in do UFC fighters still get PPV points?)
He was in the frame for the UFC’s White House event in June 2026 and was passed over. The promotion instead held him back for International Fight Week, building its biggest weekend of the year around his return.
The opponent, though, tells you the UFC wasn’t handing him a soft landing. Max Holloway is a former featherweight champion who has beaten both Dustin Poirier and current lightweight champion Justin Gaethje in recent years. McGregor beat him on points back in 2013, when Holloway was 21 and unranked. That man no longer exists.
FAQs
When was Conor McGregor’s last fight before UFC 329?
UFC 264 on 10 July 2021, against Dustin Poirier. He lost by first-round TKO after breaking his leg.
When was Conor McGregor’s last win?
January 2020, a 40-second knockout of Donald Cerrone at UFC 246. That is his only victory in his last four fights.
Was Conor McGregor banned from the UFC?
Not by the UFC. He served an 18-month anti-doping suspension, revealed in October 2025 and backdated to September 2024, for three missed-test whereabouts failures. It expired in March 2026.
Why was the Michael Chandler fight cancelled?
McGregor broke his little toe in training roughly two weeks before UFC 303 in June 2024. The fight was never rescheduled.
How old is Conor McGregor?
He was 37 when he returned at UFC 329, turning 38 three days after the fight.
To Conclude
The broken leg is the story everyone tells, because it’s the one with the video clip. But it explains maybe two of the five years.
The rest is a broken toe that killed the comeback nobody thought could fail, an 18-month doping ban that quietly ran through 2025, a civil verdict that cost him his biggest sponsor, and a man rich enough that he never had to hurry.
Five years. 1,827 days. Longer than it took him to conquer the sport in the first place.
