Conor McGregor and Carl Froch trade shots on Twitter during Usyk vs Joshua 2 fight

For some reason, former UFC champion Conor McGregor and former boxing champion Carl Froch have entered into a “Twitter beef,” which will probably ultimately go nowhere but was kind of funny in the middle of Saturday’s huge slate of fights across both sports.

McGregor got it kicked off by throwing a shot from downtown very suddenly during the Usyk vs Joshua 2 coverage:

Froch did not take long to respond:

For now it hasn’t gone any further, really, though McGregor did pop another shot at Froch in after Usyk-Joshua had ended:

McGregor, 34, was last seen fighting in July 2021, when he lost a second straight fight to Dustin Poirier at UFC 264. He’d previously lost to Poirier in Jan. 2021 at UFC 257 via second round KO, and has just one win in UFC since 2016, that one coming when he beat Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone quickly at UFC 246 in early 2020.

He has also boxed the one time, of course, dropping a TKO to Floyd Mayweather in 2017. Mostly he seems to be content to be rich and Tweet.

Froch, 45, last fought in 2014, when he knocked out George Groves in front of 80,000 at Wembley Stadium. A multiple-time super middleweight titlist, Froch retired into a spot with Sky Sports.

McGregor has talked about boxing again for years, but McGregor says lots of things. Froch really doesn’t seem to have had any great itch to fight again, he seems content in retirement, but last year he did talk about fighting Jake or Logan Paul — and why he wouldn’t at his age, most likely. But in that interview from Mar. 2021, he talked about the Mayweather vs McGregor fight.

Froch said, “The (novelty fight) that really got me interested was Mayweather-Conor McGregor. That got me interested, thinking, ‘Hang on, this Conor McGregor is really a top fighter, top mixed martial artist.’ You watch him scrapping away, rolling around the floor in the pentagon, or the cage or whatever, and you think to yourself, ‘How’s Mayweather gonna be now? He’s been retired (two years).’ I genuinely thought it would be a bit of a fight while it lasted, I always thought Mayweather was gonna win. But it was such a mismatch.

“Mayweather was, like, laughing from round one. Laughing, physically laughing to himself, thinking, ‘This is so much easier than I thought it would be.’ Mayweather’s not stupid, he knows boxing so he knew it was gonna be easy, but I don’t think he realized how easy it was gonna be. Then he just held him up for a few rounds and then got him out of there when he fancied it.”

Will we see McGregor vs Froch? Probably not, no! Froch doesn’t seem super motivated by money and McGregor mostly doesn’t actually do anything anymore. There’s also risk on both sides; Froch is in his mid-40s and hasn’t fought in nearly a decade at this point, so he might look really bad against a novice pro boxer like McGregor, and McGregor could go out there and get trounced by a guy in his mid-40s who hasn’t fought in nearly a decade at this point, which would look bad.

But they did do some amusing Tweets.