Stephen Espinoza Explains Why McGregor-Malignaggi Sparring Footage Wasn’t Used by Showtime

Stephen Espinoza has explained why Showtime hasn’t used footage from Conor McGregor’s sparring session with Paulie Malignaggi.

UFC President Dana White recently said Showtime didn’t want to make Malignaggi look bad so they denied using sparring footage for their “All Access” series. Espinoza told Sporting News that this isn’t the case:

“Dana’s misinformed here because we were dealing directly with Conor’s team on this. We did not receive as Dana said, a ton of footage. We received a few short clips. Roughly a minute total which were provided by the Conor camp. We reviewed them and were very interested in using them and including them in ‘All Access.'”

Espinoza said repetition was the deciding factor in declining the footage.

“But it was a series of sort of spliced-together McGregor highlights, eight or nine seconds each. We didn’t want to use the whole thing. It was sort of repetitive. We were told if we didn’t use the whole segment as they edited it then we couldn’t use it at all. So in the end, Conor’s camp withheld permission for us to use it. Otherwise we definitely wanted to use it. There was no intent to protect Paulie. We just wanted to cut some of the clips because it was pretty redundant, repetitive stuff.”