Jose Aldo Wants UFC Release After McGregor vs. Alvarez Announced

Jose Aldo wants out of his UFC contract after the company announced that Eddie Alvarez and Conor McGregor will main event UFC 205. Aldo spoke with Combate and said he doesn’t trust Dana White now that the bout has been announced and McGregor will not give up the featherweight title. Aldo is the interim featherweight champion. You can see Aldo’s comments below:

On how he fought out about Alvarez vs. McGregor: “I heard about everything that happened from my coach. He’d talked to Sean Shelby on Saturday, and Sean didn’t have an answer for anything and asked if I could fight on Nov. 12. My coach answered that if it were against Conor, yes, and then Sean asked him if I’d fight Max Holloway or Anthony Pettis. Then (Andre Pederneiras) said that, for these two, he’d rather do a full camp and that it could happen on Dec. 10. So we waited until Dana said publicly that he wanted this fight with McGregor to happen. Then we were expecting it to happen: either I’d have my rematch to unify the featherweight belt or I’d get my belt back fighting Holloway or Pettis, considering that, according to what Dana himself had been saying all along, Conor couldn’t keep both belts. But, to my surprise, I found out last night about the fight between McGregor and Eddie Alvarez, who’d also been denied by Dana himself last week and, to make matters worse, he’d keep the featherweight belt, being able to get two belts simultaneously.”

On what he thinks about the UFC letting McGregor keep the linear belt even though he hasn’t fought in the division since their last bout: “Conor, himself, had said he wasn’t going to give the belt away and that no one would take it from him. After all of this, I see I can’t trust a single word from president Dana White and that the person in charge of the event now is Conor McGregor. Since I’m not here to be McGregor’s employer, I ask for my contract with the UFC to be terminated. When they suggested the fight against Frankie Edgar, Dana said the winner of this fight would either be McGregor’s challenger or have the undisputed belt, because if he didn’t return to the featherweight division after the Nate Diaz rematch, he’d lose the belt. After so many times being lied to, I don’t feel motivated to fight in the UFC anymore.”

On Dana White saying that McGregor will have to defend the featherweight belt next: “I no longer believe in Dana’s statement that Conor would have to give up one of the belts after UFC 205 since, from what we’re seeing, this type of decision is no longer in his hands, since now Conor is the one calling the shots. The biggest proof that the person in charge of the UFC is Conor is that when I wanted to move up to fight Pettis, they said I’d have to give up my belt and try the fight with no belt. With him, not only did they let him fight in the upper division without losing the belt, they let him do other fights as he wishes. I understand he’s a big draw, but there’s a limit in which this is no longer a sport and it’s a circus. I don’t want any type of fight with the UFC. The only thing I want is to move on with my life and that they move on with theirs.”