Both Irish, both world champions, so why is Conor McGregor more famous than Carl Frampton?

Like millions around the world, I enjoy watching Conor McGregor. The guy possesses true star quality; he's articulate, funny, confident, arrogant (in a good way) - all of it combined in a package that makes for great entertainment. Moreover, after his recent victory in his rematch with Nate Diaz, he's also as tough and as brave as they come.

Yet considering the limitations of MMA when compared to boxing - i.e. brutal instead of beautiful, clumsy rather than clinical, a sport in which it is the attributes of the ploughhorse rather than the racehorse that hold sway - it has to count as a travesty that Conor McGregor is the world's best known fighting Irishman, unable to walk down any high street or main street in the Western world without being recognised, while Carl Frampton could conceivably stand outside his local supermarket for an hour or two and not be given a second look.

This gulf in profile between two professional fighters from the same island, both of whom are world champions, is not a judgment on the qualities of both sports - how could it be given that boxing is the far superior of the two? It is, however, an indictment of the lack of integrity when it comes to the money side of boxing in relation to its surplus when it comes to MMA. To put it plainly, where the UFC treats MMA fans as more than ticket and PPV fodder, the people in control of boxing have a tendency to do precisely the opposite. The result is that MMA has been allowed to occupy much of the space previously dominated by boxing when it comes to spectator interest and mainstream recognition, and losing far too many fans to its MMA rival as a result.

Just consider that magical era of great heavyweight contests of the sixties and seventies, when the best fought the best - and more than once. Does anyone seriously believe that if those legendary names - Ali, Bonavena, Chuvalo, Patterson, Liston, Frazier, Foreman, Norton, etc. - were fighting today that they'd be allowed to fight one another until the very last dollar bill had been wrung out of fights against lesser opposition? Or how about the great middleweight era of the 1980s, when the Four Horsemen - Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, and Duran - went to war against once another when they were still in their prime? The aforementioned ring greats did not place a priority on preserving an unbeaten record, nor did they go out of their way to take the easy route to the top. By doing things the hard and right way they developed and improved in ways they would never have otherwise.

Now fast forward to the highly anticipated fight between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquaio in 2015. One thing on which every boxing fan, commentator and writer was agreed was that it was a fight that should have happened six or seven years before it did, when both fighters were in their prime, especially Pacquaio whose decline was self evident throughout a contest that did much to turn off even the most ardent follower of the sport. As for Mayweather, towards the end of his career we are talking one of the most risk averse world champions boxing has seen, focused on protecting and preserving his 'O' regardless of the quality of opposition he opted to face in the process. It was boxing as business rather than supreme test of courage, skill, movement, and will. Not that Mayweather's legacy is one to be sniffed at. As a fighter he was playing chess while his opponents were playing chequers, which meant he was hardly ever forced out of second gear. But unlike Conor McGregor vis-a-vis Nate Diaz, Mayweather never looked at a mountain in the shape of a Golovkin and felt the urge to climb it. Even when he fought Canelo he made sure it was at a catchweight that ensured the Mexican's biggest fight was not the one that unfolded in the ring but one he was forced to conduct against the scales before he stepped through the ropes.

Boxing is in desperate need of its own Dana White to clean house and reassert the primacy of the action inside the ring between the fighters over the deals and horsetrading that takes place outside between promoters and managers. The plethora of boxing sanctioning bodies have only served to diminish the status attached to a world title, while the control exerted by promoters has over time denuded the sweet science of much of its cachet value.

Something has to be done and done quickly, else a fighter of Carl Frampton's undoubted quality risks continuing to stand criminally unrecognised outside that supermarket while his compatriot, Conor McGregor, swaggers up and down the Vegas Strip like he owns the place.