Manager: Jose Aldo willing to go to court to battle the UFC
Jose Aldo is a very unhappy fighter and he wants out of the UFC so badly that he may be willing to go to court to get out of his contract.
That's the word from Aldo's long time coach and manager Andre Pederneiras, who told Combate in Brazil that the interim featherweight champion is dead serious about his desire to leave the organization once and for all.
Aldo first voiced his decision to leave the UFC on Tuesday after the promotion announced that featherweight champion Conor McGregor would not be surrendering his title while also getting a fight for the 155 pound title against Eddie Alvarez.
Aldo had been promised a fight with McGregor after defeating Frankie Edgar at UFC 200 as well as UFC president Dana White saying that he would strip the title from the Irishman if his next bout wasn't at 145 pounds.
Neither of those things happened and Aldo is finally fed up.
"I think Dana and the new owners have to understand that there’s a completely unsatisfied employee who doesn’t want to continue," Pederneiras said (translation by MMAFighting). "If that was in Brazil and a guy said ‘boss, I want to leave,’ I’d say ‘OK, I can’t hold you.’ The contract we have in the UFC, ‘boss, I want to leave,’ the answer is ‘no, you’ll be stuck with me, you might not do anything, but you can’t leave here.’ Is that something nice?
"I think it creates dissatisfaction, and he will want to go to court. He would have to go to court to cut this contract. And the damage a dissatisfied person, someone like Aldo, talking (expletive) to everyone about a lot of things, I think the company wouldn’t want a guy like this every day in the media talking trash."
Following Aldo's initial statement on Tuesday, White said that he planned on reaching out to the embattled interim champion to hopefully reach some kind of an agreement on his next fight.
From the sound of things, Aldo doesn't want any part of it and he's standing firm in his desire to leave the UFC sooner rather than later.
"We don’t want a war, we don’t want a fight, we don’t want to talk bad about anyone. We only want the right to say ‘I don’t want to be here anymore. It’s not about money, I don’t want to be here anymore'," Pederneiras said.
"He was already pissed off with the situation of being left aside without an answer. You can’t do that with someone like Aldo. You can do that to someone who just entered the UFC now, but not with a guy that went undefeated for 10 years, not with a guy that was the first and only champion until he lost the belt in a 13-second situation, and earned his rematch, was fooled and it didn’t happen."
According to his coach and manager, Aldo still has six fights remaining on his current UFC deal so getting cut from his contract would seem nearly impossible considering the promotion would have to release him free and clear, which would then make him available to sign with any other organization in the world.
