MMA Champion, Boxer & Entrepreneur

Conor McGregor's Franck Muller Vanguard: The Notorious One's Diamond-Bezel Watch

From a plumber's apprentice in Crumlin collecting welfare to the first UFC fighter in history to hold two championship belts simultaneously, Conor McGregor built an empire through will, performance, and a persona so big it became its own industry. The Franck Muller Vanguard with diamond bezel on his wrist is exactly the watch the "Master of Complications" designed for the man who complicated every room he walked into.

Conor McGregor — Franck Muller Vanguard. Source: @thenotoriousmma / Instagram

Franck Muller Vanguard — tonneau case, bold Arabic numerals, diamond-set bezel

Conor Anthony McGregor was born July 14, 1988, the youngest of three children in a working-class family in Crumlin, Dublin 12. His father Tony drove taxis; his mother Margaret worked in a laundry. He played football as a boy and at 12 enrolled at the Crumlin Boxing Club, where coach Phillip Sutcliffe recognised what he was looking at and put it to work. McGregor began training MMA in his teens at Straight Blast Gym Ireland under John Kavanagh — a relationship that would define both their careers.

His parents, practical about it, persuaded him to take a plumber's apprenticeship when he finished school. He lasted one year. The story of those years — collecting welfare while his girlfriend Dee Devlin kept the household running, training in the morning and in the evening, staying on a blow-up bed in his mates' hotel room in Greece because he had no money while they had plenty — was later captured by ESPN in a profile written before the Mayweather fight. His friends from Crumlin remembered the Peugeot 206 and the calls from his dad: "Come home. Go back to plumbing." He didn't go back. A chess board made from plumber's fittings — a gift before he left for America — became one of the better-known artefacts of his origin story.

He turned professional in MMA in 2008, compiled a record through Ireland's Cage Warriors promotion and became its simultaneous featherweight and lightweight champion — the first European fighter to hold titles in two weight classes at once. The UFC signed him in 2013. He knocked out Marcus Brimage in 67 seconds on debut. Two years later, at UFC 194, he knocked out José Aldo in 13 seconds — still the fastest finish in UFC title fight history — to claim the featherweight championship.

"He built the watch collection to match the persona — and the persona was always about making a room understand, immediately, that the rules had changed."

In November 2016 he moved up in weight and stopped Eddie Alvarez in the second round at UFC 205, becoming the first fighter in UFC history to hold championships in two weight classes simultaneously. After the fight, as he had done after nearly every major win, he marked the moment with a watch. He had predicted he would buy a Patek Philippe when he got past Alvarez — and he did, a Nautilus 5980/1R-001 in 18k rose gold with a black dial. John Kavanagh once observed that McGregor buys a watch, and within a week it's sitting in a box and he doesn't look at it again. That's not a slight — it's a portrait of a man for whom each watch represented a moment already passed, and the next challenge was the only thing that mattered.

In 2017, he crossed over into boxing to fight Floyd Mayweather Jr. — the undefeated five-weight world champion and widely considered the greatest defensive boxer alive. McGregor lost in the tenth round on a technical knockout, having survived longer than most experts predicted. He earned over $100 million from the bout, which became the second highest-grossing boxing event in history at that time with 4.3 million pay-per-view buys. In September 2018 he launched Proper No. Twelve Irish whiskey, named after the Dublin 12 postal district. By 2021 he and his partners had sold their majority stake to Proximo Spirits in a deal valued at up to $600 million, with Forbes listing McGregor as the world's highest-paid athlete of 2020 at $180 million — $150 million of which came from the whiskey sale.

A Collection Built Fight by Fight

McGregor's first serious watch — according to watch-following sites that tracked his appearances — was a Rolex Sky-Dweller in solid yellow gold, reportedly gifted to him by former UFC owner Lorenzo Fertitta in 2013 as the organisation signed him. That single piece established the trajectory. From there the collection grew systematically: Rolex Day-Date in three configurations (rose gold with olive green dial, platinum with ice blue dial, yellow gold with champagne dial), Rolex Daytona in yellow gold with green dial, multiple Sky-Dwellers, an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore Chronograph, the Patek Philippe Nautilus 5980/1R purchased after the Alvarez fight, Patek Philippe World Time, Calatrava in Celtic enamel, and eventually reaching into Jacob & Co.'s most theatrical territory — including the Astronomia Casino at $620,000 with a working miniature roulette wheel inside the case.

The Franck Muller Vanguard with diamond bezel sits in a different register from those pieces — not the institutional prestige of Patek, not the sports-luxury establishment of Rolex or AP, but the avant-garde flamboyance of a brand that decided in 1991 that horology didn't have to look like it always had. The Vanguard's tonneau case with integrated strap, its bold over-scaled Arabic numerals in colour, and the diamond-set bezel are design choices that refuse to be subtle. On McGregor, that reads as entirely consistent.

The "Master of Complications" and the Notorious One

Franck Muller — the brand — lists its celebrity wearers as a point of identity. The Wikipedia entry on the company names Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elton John, Cristiano Ronaldo, David Beckham, Kanye West, Conor McGregor, Floyd Mayweather, and Paris Hilton in the same breath. That McGregor and Mayweather — two men who made $500 million between them fighting each other — both wear Franck Muller is either a coincidence or a portrait of exactly the audience the brand has cultivated: performers of extraordinary ability who wear their success as an outward fact rather than a discreet one.

The Vanguard was described by one watch publication as the natural choice for McGregor because it was "designed with sporting efficiency in mind" — the integrated build, the curved case, the streamlined profile. That's one reading. The other is simpler: Conor McGregor came from a neighbourhood in Dublin 12 where his closest friends had money from dealing and he had none. He chose a different route. By the time he was wearing a diamond-bezel Franck Muller on his wrist, the name of his whiskey was named after that same postal code — Dublin 12, Proper No. Twelve — and the watch was a reminder of how far the route had taken him.

And at Spot.Watch — that's always worth noticing.