GSP Reveals Three Conditions That Killed Anderson Silva Fight

Georges St-Pierre has finally explained why the fight many consider the greatest matchup never made in UFC history never happened — and the answer is simpler than the years of speculation suggested.

GSP put three conditions to the UFC, waited for a response, and never received one": "My request was to fight Anderson Silva, I want to be put under contract. I want to be compensated better, one. I wanted this to be done at a catchweight, because Anderson fought in PRIDE at 170, and I knew he could go down. And the third one was I wanted to have drug testing implemented. And they never got back to me," St-Pierre said

The three conditions were not unreasonable on their face. The compensation request reflected the commercial scale of a superfight between two of the sport's greatest champions.

The catchweight proposal had sporting logic behind it — St-Pierre was a natural welterweight and Silva had competed at 170 pounds in PRIDE, meaning a middle ground between 170 and 185 was a legitimate basis for negotiation rather than an attempt to gain an unfair advantage.

The drug testing request was the most pointed of the three, arriving at a time when performance-enhancing substance use was a persistent topic in MMA and one that St-Pierre had spoken about publicly on multiple occasions.

The silence from the UFC ended the conversation before it started. St-Pierre retired after stopping Michael Bisping for the middleweight title at UFC 217 in 2017, while Silva parted ways with the promotion in 2020 following three consecutive losses. A brief flirtation with a boxing match between the two in 2021 stalled without producing anything concrete.

The fight that would have settled one of the sport's great hypotheticals — the greatest welterweight against the greatest middleweight, in their respective primes or close to it — now belongs permanently to the category of what might have been.