Conor McGregor will be leaving his family at home when he fights Dustin Poirier at UFC 264 this Summer, just weeks after welcoming his third child.
MMA superstar McGregor, 32, will fight rival Poirier in a trilogy fight after the American won their rematch at UFC 257 in Abu Dhabi earlier this year.
And speaking during a rare social media Q&A with fans, Conor admitted that he struggled to balance his family-man image with preparing to fight.
Replying to a question about training his son Conor Jr to fight, McGregor made the admission that he would be fighting away from his fiancee Dee Devlin and children Conor and Croia.
“I am going to do this fight away from the family,” McGregor said. “For a change. Fights and boppies and cuddles is a hard one to balance, I’m going into this one a wild dog.”
The Irishman became a parent with long-time girlfriend Devlin in May of 2017, and the pair welcomed their first daughter Croia in January 2019. He revealed during the Twitter session that they are expecting their third baby next week.
Conor Jr was present for much of the build-up to McGregor’s mega-money boxing match with Floyd Mayweather Jr in 2017, as well as his heated UFC Lightweight title fight with Khabib Nurmagomedov just over a year later.
McGregor and Devlin were much less public when daughter Croia was born, but she and her brother were in Las Vegas for fight week ahead of his January 2020 comeback bout with Donald ‘Cowboy’ Cerrone, and Abu Dhabi for UFC 257.
Former two-weight UFC champion McGregor was very open in his social media question session with fans last night, which saw his name and the hashtag #AskNotorious trending worldwide with tens of thousands of tweets.
He revealed plans to head back up to welterweight in future, as well as plans to fight at least twice more in 2021, which would be his first time as active since 2016.
Back then, McGregor made history by dethroning legendary featherweight champion José Aldo within 13 seconds before jumping up two weight classes to fight Nate Diaz twice.
Within 11 months of that Aldo victory, he had won the Lightweight title in New York by defeating Eddie Alvarez to become the first fighter to simultaneously hold belts in multiple UFC weight divisions.
He also claimed that his easiest opponent was Poirier in their first meeting at UFC 178, where he stopped the Lousiana native in the first two minutes.
