Dana White has already joked that he would “kill” Amanda Nunes if she retired . But the UFC president clearly knows the women’s 145-pound division will be in trouble if she walks away from the Octagon. Following her dominant featherweight title defence against Felicia Spencer at UFC 250 this month, “The Lioness” is taking the rest of 2020 off, with motherhood looming, but indicated this week she could make her absence permanent. Asked at a media scrum at the UFC Apex in Las Vegas, ahead of UFC Fight Night on Saturday night, White indicated the featherweight division would not continue without the Brazilian. The win over Spencer was Nunes’ defence of the belt, 18 months after winning it. “Probably not,” White said. “I literally just told the guys the other day to build that division up. Let’s start signing girls, start building the division and now the girl is talking about retirement, so apparently we gotta get on the same page and figure this thing out.” Nunes (20-4), who is also the bantamweight champion, insisted “there’s nothing else to be done right now” and “I’ve achieved everything I wanted”. The 32-year-old has finished every other previous UFC 135-pound champ in the first round, and made history against Canadian Spencer by becoming the first UFC fighter to defend belts in two weight divisions while holding both. “I hope she doesn’t [retire],” White added. “She’s [Nunes] one of my favourite people ever, and coming off the performance that she put on, I think that the beautiful thing was she came out of the [Germaine] de Randamie fight and everybody was like, ‘She looked human’, this, that, and all the critics were all over her. “She fought arguably the best female striker of all time, beat her, and she looked human in that fight, and then she came out and put a statement on her last performance, she looked incredible and put on an absolute clinic against one of the toughest women I’ve ever seen in my life. “And after a performance like that I’d hate to think that she’d want to retire. But if that’s true and that’s where she’s at right now, then she probably should.”