Nearly two years ago, when rumours first emerged of a potential boxing match between Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather, it was dismissed by almost every media outlet as being nothing more than a pipe dream, a marketing exercise to keep both fighters’ names in the newspapers.

When McGregor and Mayweather eventually met in the ring in Las Vegas last August, it became the biggest sporting event of the year and one of the most watched and lucrative boxing matches in history.

Such was the interest in seeing two of the most bombastic figures in their respective disciplines trade blows that intrigue still remains in a pairing between the two, but this time in McGregor’s home turf of mixed martial arts — and, the master marketer that he is, Floyd Mayweather has fanned those flames by posting a series of brief Instagram videos teasing him stepping into a cage.

While those particular videos are nothing more than viral marketing campaigns for a sports betting company who sponsor Mayweather, the interest in them shows that there is still a public appetite for anything McGregor vs. Mayweather related.

So, if they were ever to meet inside a UFC octagon, how would the fight go down? Conventional wisdom says it would be a whitewash. James Toney, making his mixed martial arts debut against Randy Couture in 2010, was a duck out of water when he faced the UFC hall of famer and was taken down and summarily submitted a couple of minutes into the first round.

And, as it turns out, that’s exactly how Michael Bisping sees a match-up going between McGregor and Mayweather should they ever cross paths in an MMA context — if Mayweather would ever agree to it.

“I honestly can’t see Floyd Mayweather fighting mixed martial arts and certainly [not] in the UFC,” Bisping said on his Believe You Me podcast. If he does fight in the UFC it’s going to be against Conor McGregor.

“Conor McGregor in an MMA fight will f****** destroy Floyd Mayweather like he’s never seen. “It takes so long to learn – so long to put the pieces of the puzzle together, so long to learn the grappling the transitions from the striking to the grappling.

“Conor McGregor would literally have a field day with Floyd Mayweather.

“I don’t know what he’s doing, he’s maybe trying to stay relevant, maybe he’s trying to hype his next boxing match, maybe he’s trying to get a rematch with Conor McGregor in the boxing world, I don’t know what he’s doing.

“But I will tell you this, everybody does have their price and apparently there was rumours floating round that a billion dollars was the price for a few fights in the UFC and a f****** billion dollars goes a long way.

“It would certainly be a record breaking pay-per-view, I don’t know if it’ll be more than McGregor vs Mayweather in a boxing ring but it certainly has the potential.”