"They're really good at manipulation" - Francis Ngannou blasts former gym for hiding sparring videos

Francis Ngannou has criticized his former gym, the MMA Factory, for allegedly hiding videos of his sparring session with Ciryl Gane. The UFC heavyweight champion notably recalled the infamous sparring video in which Gane seemingly got the better of him.

Taking to his YouTube channel, Francis Ngannou revealed that the sparring session transpired in January 2019. ‘The Predator’ claimed that they trained together for a month and that he'd bested Gane in sparring, except in the part shown in the video. Ngannou stated:

“When I saw that footage, my first reaction was laughing. Because I know exactly what happened at those training sessions. But this is the thing. When they want to like, do some highlight, they always choose the part of the video that they use. And they have a lot of videos like that because, at the time, he was like, they were filming our training session to promote him, his fight, and everything. So, there was a lot of footage from those few training sessions. But a lot of them never came out and would never come out, will never come out. And I know for a fact that they will never come out.”

Ngannou went on. He expressed how he was intrigued by the actions of Gane's team. He also accused his former camp of employing "manipulation."

“It’s about to make him look better and make me look bad; to prove that he’s the man,” Ngannou added. “I really get intrigued by those stuff sometimes. And then how they just control people’s mind, conditioning them to think. And they just think like, suddenly they just shift from one way to other way of thinking. And I’m like, how easy is that to manipulate people, which, they’re really good at manipulation. But at the end of the day, as I said, we both know; everyone knows for a fact.”

Watch Francis Ngannou jibe at his former gym in the video below:

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Chael Sonnen loves the Francis Ngannou vs. Ciryl Gane fight

All things considered, Francis Ngannou asserted that MMA Factory's star pupil Ciryl Gane is indeed a skilled fighter. Furthermore, widely-revered MMA analyst Chael Sonnen recently opined that Ngannou vs. Gane could be even bigger than Brock Lesnar’s fights:

“I believe the marketing and PR that's going to be rolled out for Ngannou vs. Gane is going to turn that into potentially the biggest heavyweight fight of all time,” Sonnen noted. “I think this fight can break Brock [Lesnar] numbers.”

UFC heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou will face interim UFC heavyweight champion Ciryl Gane at UFC 270 on January 22nd. The Ngannou-Gane winner will emerge as the undisputed UFC heavyweight champion and could defend the title against Jon Jones later in 2022.