You can generally tell who's ever been in any kind of actual fight (y'know, a situation where the goal is to actually hurt the other guy and not score formal points) by how they talk about sports not being real fighting as a positive, I assume that's where Neeson is coming from there.

I sort of suspect that quote is cherry-picked to start shiat, as well, since McGregor is... kind of famously a train-wreck level fark-up for reasons unrelated to his fighting career which it would be much more logical for someone to find him distasteful for.

// UFC is completely unremarkable vanilla combat sport identical to every other, rendered remarkable primarily by its fanbase being completely farking insufferable.  Like... UFC fans are basically football fans but pretentious as fark, it's the kind of "worst of all possible worlds" combination you'll rarely ever see unless you make a habit of attending Trump rallies or some shiat.  The fighters aren't responsible for this, they're just the grunts doing the actual work of entertaining people, but still, god damn.  They're like Nemesis Universe Pro Wrestling fans.  I guess what I'm getting at here is that I have suspicions as to why Neeson might have a general level of background annoyance with the sport as a whole, too.