Reported Conor McGregor post from 2012 shows how much he was struggling for money

Conor McGregor is the UFC's top earning star.

We know he likes to keep it quiet, but the Irishman has money coming out of his ears these days. His second fight with Nate Diaz earned him a cool $15m and he's staring down the barrel of potentially his biggest ever pay cheque when he faces lightweight champion Eddie Alvarez at UFC 205. If it hits the 2 million pay-per-view buys McGregor is predicting, he could be on for a $20m payday. But as we know, McGregor hasn't always been swimming in cash and adorned with posh watches and fine suits. He was famously on the dole as a hard-up fighter collecting social security money to keep him afloat before he hit the big time with the UFC. “When things were really bad I didn’t have a pot to p*ss in,” he said in a previous interview. “Really, nothing.'' Even when he was fighting on the European Cage Warrior promotion, where he simultaneously held the featherweight and lightweight world titles, he was still flat broke. His coach John Kavanagh recently explained in the Sunday Independent just how little McGregor had - yet still kept his eyes on the prize and kept fighting.

"It wasn't easy. Conor was on the dole, earning €100 a fight and training at the height of winter in a cold gym. Now, I don't care how passionate you are, but there are always going to be periods thinking 'F**k this! What am I doing here?" "Conor's annual earnings for that five-year period was something like €1,500 a year. There was no money and I was running out of ideas. The UFC was a closed shop."

But if anything shows just how poor he was back then, it's this snippet of a Facebook message McGregor reportedly sent back in 2012 before he won that first Cage Warriors featherweight title. It appears to show The Notorious having trouble to stump up the $250 needed to pay the licence for a walk-out song at his fight. The image containing snippets of the apparent message between McGregor and producer Mikey Rukus recently appears online and shows the Irishman just couldn't afford to pay up. The message reads: With McGregor now in the Forbes Rich List and now pushing the seven-figure mark in his fights, it must seem like a lifetime ago he was scrabbling around to make ends meet with what would now be pocket money to him. Catch up with the latest Football Friday Live here: