Sean O'Malley says Daniel Cormier messaged him to say he should fight for the title

O'Malley said the pair then recorded a podcast together, and that he no longer feels Cormier wants to see him lose.

Daniel Cormier has told Sean O'Malley he deserves the next bantamweight title shot, O'Malley told The Ariel Helwani Show, first in a direct message and then on a podcast the pair recorded together.

"He had messaged me on Instagram," O'Malley said. "He just said, you know, hey, I do think that you should fight for the title." O'Malley said he wrote back that he did not take anything personally, and that even if Cormier "thought Song was deserving, I would not care."

Cormier's team then asked to shoot a podcast episode with O'Malley, and the two spoke the night before the interview. "He said he thinks I'm deserving. He thinks I should be next and all that. But yeah, it was good. It was cordial," O'Malley said.

Cormier was in the cage at UFC 333 when Petr Yan beat Merab Dvalishvili to keep the bantamweight title, and asked Yan about Song rather than O'Malley, a question O'Malley called "anticlimactic" as he watched. Dana White has said Yan's next opponent is between Song and O'Malley.

Asked whether Cormier had something against him, O'Malley said he had felt that in the past. "I felt like coming up there was like a little bias. He just kind of wanted to see me lose a little bit," he said, recalling his fight with Thomas Almeida as one of those times. "At one point I felt like that. Now I don't feel like that."

He added that commentating is "a hard job", with Cormier sitting through eight hours of fights before breaking them down: "You're not gonna always say the right thing."

READ NEXTSean O'Malley says Song Yadong would knock out Merab Dvalishvili 'for sure' over three roundsRead the next story →

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