CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 189: BAKU TWO

UFC Fight Night: Fiziev vs Torres

SATURDAY, JUNE 27 FROM THE NATIONAL GYMNASTICS ARENA IN BAKU, AZERBAIJAN
EARLY START TIME WARNING | PRELIMS 6 AM PDT / 9 AM EDT | MAIN CARD 9 AM / 12 PM

There’s exactly one main section I wound up pulling out of the White House write-up this month: A rumination on the way the UFC’s repositioning of itself as a faux-regional promotion whose two primary products are a) a developmental talent show they don’t expect their fans to pay real attention to and b) traveling shows that take money from countries to create locally-friendly shows that’ll totally put those small countries like Australia on the map. Watching them have to turn that on its head and figure out how to program a regional-appeal for their own American backyard was fascinating, in a this-is-what-America-is-to-them sense, but there was already too much going on in that essay and I just didn’t think it fit.

And now we’re in Baku, where the government paid the UFC millions of dollars to bring them a card where only two out of thirteen fights are between ranked, relevant fighters, but ten out of thirteen feature a fighter whose name ends with a V. Thank you, Baku.

it's just so many Vs.

MAIN EVENT: THE CHURN
LIGHTWEIGHT: Rafael Fiziev (13-5, #11) vs Manuel Torres (17-3, #15)

Rafael, you are too damn young to be in the ‘old veteran getting put out to pasture’ position.

The first time we talked about Raffy Fizzy in these writeups it was mid-2022, he was 5-1 in the UFC, he hadn’t lost a fight in more than three years and he was about to cement his place as a top ten Lightweight by not just beating but knocking out Rafael dos Anjos, which was, at the time, incredibly impressive. His striking seemed a step above everyone in the division, his back-pocket wrestling had progressed nicely while no one was paying attention, and a giant swath of the audience saw him as a future title contender. He was booked into a fight with Justin Gaethje as a -250 favorite.

It’s four years later. Rafael is 1 for his last 5. What the hell happened?

Well, part of it is just incredibly bad luck. Losing a decision--and not even a unanimous decision, a majority decision--to Justin Gaethje, current #1 Lightweight on the planet, is nothing to feel too bad about, and with a solid rebound Fiziev would’ve been right back in the mix. That looked like it was in the cards, too, as he met Mateusz Gamrot, defended almost all of his takedowns and unanimously won the first round. Two minutes into the second round Fiziev blew his ACL. A year and a half of his prime disappeared on the spot. When he was finally healthy, rehabbed and ready to go, the UFC looked at his two straight losses and 18 months of inactivity and very sensitively booked him into a short-notice fill-in match...against Justin Gaethje, the man who had beaten him two fights prior. Unsurprisingly, Fiziev did not win. He averted a career crash by knocking off Ignacio Bahamondes, and that was supposed to propel him into a top contendership match with Charles Oliveira, but Fiziev’s injuries cropped up again, and he instead followed months of recovery with a severe drubbing at the hands of Maurício Ruffy.

And that’s the other reason he’s in this particular hole. The Lightweight division has changed an awful lot in a very short time. When Fiziev stepped into the cage for that first fight against Gaethje, the division’s top ten included Dustin Poirier, Beneil Dariush, Michael Chandler, Rafael dos Anjos and Jalin Turner. Drew fucking Dober was #14. Arman Tsarukyan wasn’t in the conversation. Max Holloway and Ilia Topuria were still Featherweights. Maurício Ruffy hadn’t even joined the UFC. No one had heard of Quillan Salkilld.

No one was paying attention to Manuel Torres.

It was hard to blame them. He wasn’t one of those smart prospects a bunch of hardcore fans were salivating for, he wasn’t fighting through Fury FC or the Legacy Fighting Alliance, he’s one of the few Mexican prospects to not have a stint with Combate Americas. He competed on regional cards. He got heel hooked by a guy named Mahatma for Club Hardcore Fighter. He had his knee ripped up for Crixus MMA, which closed after five events. One fight before his Contender Series debut, Manuel was beating up a 10-11 man named Carlos Cañada for the ULTIMATE WARRIOR CHALLENGE. But he rattled off three straight first-round finishes in the UFC after just a year and a half! That’s top-fifteen worthy, right?

As it turns out: No. Beating Frank Camacho and Nikolas Motta and Chris Duncan does not prepare you for the top of the heap. The UFC gave Manuel a borderline-ranked shot at the much-maligned, Mexico-focused mega-event at The Sphere©, and it ended with Ignacio Bahamondes knocking him flat in four minutes. Ignacio, who, as we know from the previous paragraph, would himself fail to beat Fiziev and achieve a top-ten ranking, was the brick wall in Manuel’s path.

Except it’s a year and a half later and Manuel’s ranked and fighting the guy who beat the guy who beat him. Once again: What the hell happened?

Here’s the thing about Lightweight: That dramatic change we talked about? It wasn’t entirely natural. For every Poirier retirement, there were a handful of attempts to churn older veterans and rid themselves of meddlesome wrestlers. Drew Dober has dozens of UFC bouts, but when they put him in front of Manuel Torres, he had lost two in a row, was 1 for his last 4, and had gotten the absolute shit beaten out of him in all three of those losses. Manuel knocking him out in two minutes wasn’t a surprise, it was a foregone conclusion. Grant Dawson spent years as an undefeated UFC Lightweight repeatedly denied chances to fight up in the rankings because of his wrestling-heavy style, and once King Green torched him, they tried to book him right back into the ground. By last December, Dawson, who had one loss in thirteen UFC appearances, had put together another three-fight winning streak and gotten his ranking back.

They booked him against the unranked Torres on a one-fight winning streak and Torres smashed him in half a round.

And, like, look: It’s fighting. You can only get so upset about fighters being forced to fight. Management did not book Manuel’s fist upside Dawson’s jaw. But you can glean an awful lot about how fighters are booked, and who is or isn’t favored, by looking at the patterns in their matchmaking.

For instance, this fight wasn’t supposed to happen. Remember this past April, when Beneil Dariush, former contender turned late-thirties hard luck story who can’t stop missing weight and getting knocked out over and over, was marched out to Australia to fight Quillan Salkilld, despite Quillan being a young, in-his-prime knockout machine and Beneil being a human target who’d been knocked out in sixteen seconds less than six months prior?

Yeah! That! That only happened because Manuel got injured. Manuel was supposed to catch that body on the undercard of Procházka vs Ulberg. So what do you do? Do you book Torres against a Salkilldian killer of a prospect? Do you make him defend his spot against a young, hungry guy?

Why would you, when you have another aging, expensive veteran on a skid who got brutally knocked out in the last half-year?

It’s crass and cynical and gross and it also makes complete sense, which makes me hate it even more. I have spilled too much ink on my yearning for the days when the UFC booked fights that were good for the division regardless of who won, rather than fights built to benefit a marketing favorite, and by that metric, this is a really smart match-up. Manuel is distinctly unlikely to wrestle Fiziev, he’s going to fight to his strengths, which virtually guarantees the kind of striking battle the c-suite considers the only acceptable form of fighting, and any eventuality works to their benefit. If Manuel blasts Fiziev out, it gives him his first recognizable victory and puts him in the conversation for a top ten bout. If Fiziev beats back another young prospect, it gives him a new lease on life at Lightweight and gives the Azerbaijani crowd a main-event victory for a hometown hero.

Good matchmaking is good matchmaking whether I like it or not. Torres is solid and dangerous as hell, but he’s also a very straightforward fighter, and I want to believe Fiziev is still fast and technically sound enough to deal with it. RAFAEL FIZIEV BY DECISION.

CO-MAIN EVENT: THE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE WHERE NOTHING MATTERS
MIDDLEWEIGHT: Shara Magomedov (16-1) vs Michel Pereira (32-14 (2))

You know? I’m fine with this.

Shara Magomedov has always occupied this inexplicable, noncanonical space in the annals of the UFC. Too talented to ignore, too good to fire, too likely to suckerpunch men in shopping malls: Too illegal to book outside of the Middle East. He’s got one eye, dude. Michael Bisping got away with being a one-eyed UFC fighter and then he bragged about it and ruined it for every cyclops of the future. For all of the UFC’s repeated assurances that Shara can absolutely totally fight in America and there’s nothing wrong and only a crazy person would say he can’t get licensed, as of this weekend, his seven UFC fights will have taken place in, respectively,

• Abu Dhabi, UAE

• Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

• Abu Dhabi again

• Abu Dhabi for a third time

• Riyadh’s back!

• Oops! All Abu Dhabis

• Baku, motherfuckers

And that’s a real bitch if you’re trying to make him relevant to anything real. Which they did! Just two fights ago they inexplicably booked Shara against Michael “Venom” Page, a man the UFC seems to actively resent having hired because they took him from getting ranked at Welterweight after taking a round off Ian Machado Garry and threw him in at Middleweight against the undefeated guy who can’t fight outside of a small vertical slice of the globe. But the campaign failed, Shara lost his unblemished record, and the UFC just sort of admitted defeat and gave up and had Shara beat up the 6-10 (1) Marc-André Barriault for shits and giggles and now it’s Michel Pereira.

Which is fine, because Michel Pereira doesn’t and arguably has never existed.

Can you prove Michel Pereira is real? A guy who does capoeira kicks but has more decisions than knockouts? A guy who did a moonsault kneedrop on his opponent’s forehead in a real fight? A guy who gained a ton of credibility as a Middleweight contender after buzzsawing three men in three minutes only for everyone to conveniently forget that Ihor Potieria and Andre Petroski aren’t real contenders and everyone in or remotely close to the top fifteen was going to beat him?

Weird knockout artist Michel Pereira, who is supposed to be a terrifying Middleweight knockout threat while also being the last man to ever record a loss against 2005’s hottest prospect, former Featherweight sensation Diego Sanchez?

Forty-three second Kyle Daukaus victim Michel Pereira?

Demonstrably-worse-than-Cody-Brundage Michel Pereira?

Yeah! That’s fine. Put him in there with Shara. Let the guy who can’t fight anywhere with an athletic commission that has at least one optometrist get in the cage with the world’s most dangerous knockout artist who can’t knock out Zach Reese. That’s a genuinely good use of both of these guys. Let them spin at each other threateningly at a ratio of 720 degrees per jab. Let the centripetal force power the lights of Baku.

Start a whole Elseworlds imprint of the UFC around these two. Put Junior Tafa in it so his continued presence makes sense. Put Charles Johnson in it so he can stop being simultaneously the most and least successful Flyweight in the world. Put Yair Rodríguez in it so he can find ways to not take fights in two places at once. Put Bryce Mitchell and Umar Nurmagomedov in it so they can talk about how the Holocaust was fake somewhere no one has to hear about it anymore.

Anything that keeps them over there. SHARA MAGOMEDOV BY TKO.

MAIN CARD: SMALL CONUNDRUMS
LIGHTWEIGHT: Nazim Sadykhov (11-2-1) vs Matheus Camilo (10-3)

Nazim, you were almost heading this thing up. 2025 was almost a breakout year for the Black Wolf. Sadykhov had been heralded as a can’t-miss prospect by all the Ray Longo aficionados out there, but going to a draw with Viacheslav “Slava Claus” Borshchev and going almost a year and a half without a fight thanks to injuries and scheduling issues dampened his hype almost completely. But Nazim surged back at the start of 2025 and, in the space of just five months, stopped the highly-hyped Ismael Bonfim and knocked out Nikolas Motta, a man who now, technically, has a knockout win over a top fifteen Lightweight. It took a little longer than expected, but Nazim was finally living up to the high expectations the world had for him. Right up until December, when Fares Ziam handed him his first-ever knockout loss. No longer borderline-ranked, no longer chasing the big time, Nazim’s just fighting to get back in the conversation.

Matheus Camilo, on the other hands, is fighting to get mentioned in it for the first time in his life. He wasn’t a hyped prospect, he wasn’t even a Contender Series signing--he got signed because of someone else’s misfortune. Dorobshokh Nabotov, a prospect out of Tajikistan, staged a series of publicity stunts that concluded in getting the microphone at a UFC press conference to ask for a shot in the company. Dana had company buddy Chan Sung Jung book him as a try-out, and Matheus Camilo got the call to test him, and Nabotov was found wanting. Camilo took Nabotov’s undefeated record, his UFC contract, and his shot at mainstream approval. He immediately spent it getting choked out by Gabe Green. A few months later Camilo righted the ship with a decision over Nazim’s former foe Slava Claus, but he’s 1-1 and on shaky ground, and booking him to fight the Azerbaijani fighter in Azerbaijan means they either have faith he can pull off another upset or they’re content to let him get crushed for the hometown crowd’s approval.

I’m banking on the Sadykhov revenge tour. NAZIM SADYKHOV BY SUBMISSION.

FLYWEIGHT: Asu Almabayev (23-3, #8) vs Charles Johnson (19-8, #14)

Flyweight is both a land of impossible riches and terrible tragedies. Asu Almabayev is one of the best 125-pound fighters in the entire world. He wrestles, he grapples, he jumps on chokes, he can bother someone for three straight rounds without looking even remotely tired and, as we just saw in his last appearance, he can violently strangle Alex Perez. Asu only has one loss not just in the UFC, but in the last nine years of his career. That loss? Manel Kape, the current top contender, and Kape did it by chaining together eyepokes into one unholy, ocularly-abhorrent combination, which was clearly visible on replays but was not overturned because our sport is fake. Asu is one of the best, but he is boxed out of the top, and he lost his shot at it by a fingertip.

Charles Johnson is in a much weirder, much funnier spot. Despite my years of recorded love for InnerG’s fighting, he is, demonstrably, not one of the best Flyweights in the world. He’s only narrowly above a 50/50 UFC average at 8-6, he hasn’t put together back-to-back wins in years, his long, solid winning streak ended at the hands of Rizin vet Ramazan Temirov, and he’s only just rebounded after getting obliterated in one round by the aforementioned Alex Perez. And yet, Charles cannot be an afterthought, because that same string of bad luck also includes knockout victories over Lone’er Kavanagh, the recently-minted #6 in the world, and Joshua fucking Van, the current world champion. Van only has one loss in an eleven-fight UFC run, and it was Johnson knocking him on his ass.

That’s the kind of thing you have to capitalize on as a journeyman, and Johnson’s fucking trying. This is a real tough matchup for him, Asu’s pressure game is very, very good and he’ll likely run Johnson right into the cage and grind him into dust, but I put up with O’Malley vs Chito 2 as a completely undeserved marketing-favorite’s-revenge title fight that passed up much more deserving contenders, and by god, let’s do that again but this time it’s for a guy I like so it’s okay. CHARLES JOHNSON BY TKO.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Ikram Aliskerov (17-2) vs Brunno Ferreira (15-3)

For mysterious reasons that definitely aren’t related to his tendency to knock people out, the UFC is real invested in Ikram Aliskerov’s future. Despite his being a relative unknown after beating the likes of Phil Hawes and Warlley Alves, when the first attempt to book former champ Robert Whittaker and Khamzat Chimaev fell through back in the summer of 2024, the UFC decided to put Aliskerov in for Khamzat and hope that, somehow, it would all work out for the best. And it did! In the sense that Bobby Knuckles dusted him in under two minutes and for us Whittaker fans, that’s the only thing left to keep us warm. They let Aliskerov crush André Muniz to get his groove back, they actually tried to book this fight an entire year ago, and when that failed they had Aliskerov beat The Iron Turtle himself, Jun Yong Park, who had, funnily enough, already lost a fight to Muniz.

If you beat someone and they follow that up by booking you against someone who already lost to the guy you beat: Congratulations! Management likes you. If you’re Brunno Ferreira, and you’ve just failed the UFC for the third time after getting stomped out in 107 seconds by Robocop Rodrigues, and in response to your loss they not only book you against an unranked opponent on a winning streak, but one they already tried to match you up with once? Brunno, buddy, I’m sorry, they’re plotting your demise. What’s even sadder: Brunno was supposed to fight Paulo Costa back in March. With a win, that would’ve gotten him a damn ranking. But Costa decided he was too bored of cutting weight and hopped to Light Heavyweight instead, and now he’s a prominent contender and Brunno is stuck fighting a big favorite knockout artist whom the local crowd would much rather root for.

Sorry, Brunno. IKRAM ALISKEROV BY TKO.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Abus Magomedov (28-7-1) vs Michał Oleksiejczuk (22-9)

Abus: I give up. I give up on you. I give you up. You and your long, lanky legs had one job, and that was to prevent us from falling into the Sean Strickland timeline, and you failed, and now he’s a two-time champion. That would be enough to damn you. But you had a chance at cleansing yourself of your sins. They put you up against Joe Pyfer last October, and once again, yours was the fist standing between Heaven and Hell, and once again, you let the god damned demons in. You got choked out and now I have no use for you. You have disappointed me too many times.

Michał: This is your job, now. Are you being set up to lose this fight? Yes. Have you, in fact, gotten destroyed by people Abus beat? Yes. Are you going to win this fight anyway, half because your time training with the Fighting Nerds seems to have worked really well in terms of getting you to finally calm the hell down and fight to your strengths and half because you are now the sword of the divine and all of the pressure of rebuilding the wall that once kept the bigots and horrors out of the Middleweight division rests on your shoulders?

Do it for Dave Menne. Do it for Murilo Bustamante. Do it for the Middleweight we need. MICHAŁ OLEKSIEJCZUK BY TKO.

PRELIMS: FINISH YOUR JUICE BOX
WELTERWEIGHT: Farman Hasanov (5-0) vs Eric Nolan (8-4)

Should Farman Hasanov be here? Probably not. He’s only fought rookies or people who, themselves, have only fought rookies, but at 5-0 that makes sense. At 5-0 you probably shouldn’t be fighting people who matter, and the fact that 5-0 people are getting into the UFC is more of an indictment of the UFC than anything else. Hasanov’s tape is mild and inoffensive, the kind of wrestleboxing that would be a throwback were it not for how kind of slow and laborious it is, like watching a c-tier sitcom pretend to be Wings, and if any part of you replied to that with “but Carl, Wings was a c-tier sitcom,” you can get the fuck out right now. Eric Nolan, on the other hand, is absolutely supposed to be here, because this is why they hired him in the first place. He was signed on 48 hours’ notice because Baisangur Susurkaev got a big win on the Contender Series and the UFC decided to pull a publicity stunt by booking him into a proper fight that same week, and Nolan was the Cage Fury FC champion--i.e., one fight beforehand he’d been competing with a 4-7 guy named Trevor Gudde--at Welterweight. So they pulled him into the main show up a weight class with two days to prepare because they wanted another guy to get a stoppage in the UFC.

And now he’s fighting a fighter who got signed for being Azerbaijani so they could put him on a card in Azerbaijan. Their decisionmaking is rarely subtle and I hope it blows up in their face. ERIC NOLAN BY TKO.

LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT: Abdul Rakhman Yakhyaev (9-0) vs Julius Walker (7-2)

The “x beat y and y beat z so x will beat z” nature of MMA math is, and has always, been specious. It exists to simplify problems that exist not in a place of logic, but dreams and mysteries. Sometimes, however, you can compress it to something more reasonable. In this case, Abdul Rakhman Yakhyaev is an undefeated man with 2 UFC wins and a near-100% finishing rate, and Julius Walker is 1-2 in the company and just got violently knocked out four months ago, and Walker’s one UFC victory was an awkward decision over Raffael Cerqueira that Cerqueira gave away after nearly knocking him out and choosing to jump a guillotine instead of finishing the job, and one fight later, Cerqueira met Yakhyaev, who floored him and choked him out in thirty-three seconds.

Math is cruel. ABDUL RAKHMAN YAKHYAEV BY TKO.

MIDDLEWEIGHT: Nursulton Ruziboev (36-9-2 (2)) vs Andrey Pulyaev (10-4)

Sometimes you have one of those fights whose end result doesn’t feel like it’s in doubt, but the act of getting there will probably still be a lot of fun. Like, Nursulton is extremely likely to win this fight. He is big and powerful and extremely hard to defeat, and Andrey Pulyaev’s career has been marked primarily by getting repeatedly outstruck. But he’s overperformed in his losses. The last time we saw Andrey he was being served up as a +650 underdog to living wrecking ball Ateba Gautier, and yeah, Pulyaev lost, but he not only ended Ateba’s finishing streak, he took a round off Ateba and even narrowly beat him on a couple media scorecards. That level of toughness starts to raise questions. How much of Nursulton’s success is favorable matchmaking? How much of Pulyaev’s failure is being constantly thrown to the wolves? If Pulyaev doesn’t go away in the first half of the fight, do the odds begin to shift?

NURSULTON RUZIBOEV BY DECISION is still the call, but Pulyaev’s got real upset potential.

FEATHERWEIGHT: Kaan Ofli (13-4-1) vs Javier Reyes (23-5)

Kaan, buddy, I don’t think this is gonna work. For those who missed my horrible 2024 odyssey through the shapeless, featureless doldrums of The Ultimate Fighter 32 (jesus christ), Kaan Ofli came from its terrible depths, and while they introduced their picks for each team and gave some background for almost everyone involved,

• Kaan Ofli of Australia, Pick #5: The show does not bother to talk about him.

Kaan ultimately lost the season's championship fight after being knocked out by Mairon Santos, but the UFC signed him anyway, because nothing means anything. Kaan lost again, but pulled together a submission over the perpetually troubled Ricardo Ramos and the perpetually overpushed Yizha, and for that, he must fall. Javier Reyes is one of the few, welcome Contender Series signings I didn't have a single bad thing to say about. He's experienced, he's well-balanced, he's aggressive and traveled, and while he does tend to favor the house style of shirking defense more than is necessarily wise, in his case, it is a skillset honed over dozens of fights rather than embraced because he hasn't been around long enough to figure out how blocking works.

He's very solid, he's very dangerous, he's hard to wrestle and he's got half a foot of reach on Kaan. Violence seems likely. JAVIER REYES BY TKO.

WELTERWEIGHT: Daniil Donchenko (13-2) vs Theodor Berggren (8-3)

We're just cramming all the TUF stuff together. Do you remember Daniil Donchenko? Do you remember anything of TUF 33 (jesus christ)? Did you even know TUF 34 (jesus christ) had its debut this week? Guess what: It didn't! That was last week. Daniel Cormier and Chael Sonnen, once upon a time stars of the sport, are old and retired and hosting a talent development show that no one fucking watches and the UFC barely acknowledges exists and your reward for winning a TUF championship now is the right to fight a guy with a journeyman's record in FIGHT CLUB RUSH and a win over in Cage Warriors against a 3-2 guy.

I miss Kendall Grove. DANIIL DONCHENKO BY DECISION.

BANTAMWEIGHT: Bekzat Almakhan (12-3) vs Jean Matsumoto (17-2)

What a deeply bizarre fight between two bizarrely booked fighters. Bekzat Almakhan was a solid and respectable if unheralded regional prospect who'd barely left his native Kazakhstan when the UFC signed him in 2024 and immediately booked him against Umar Nurmagomedov, one of the three best Bantamweights on the entire planet. Shockingly, he lost, and they've been keeping him in a strange holding pattern ever since, wheeling him out to beat up poor Brad Katona or test Ilia Topuria's brother Aleksandre, and now, he's here to see if Jean Matsumoto still has what it takes. Just a touch over one year ago, Jean looked like he was going to be a player in Bantamweight's new era. Young, well-rounded, undefeated, defensively sound--when Dominick Cruz fell out of his own retirement fight with Rob Font the UFC picked Jean to take his place, and the world widely considered him a favorite to beat the eternal gatekeeper and take his place in the rankings. Sixteen months later, Jean is 1 for 3 and all three fights were split decision tossups, with Font and Farid Basharat both beating Jean. For three straight fights, Jean was a main card prospect. Now he's one slot away from curtain-jerking in Baku, and there are valid questions to be asked about how much of his fall comes from higher competition and how much comes from losing part of his edge.

BEKZAT ALMAKHAN BY DECISION. I think Jean is heading to the land of What Ifs.

WELTERWEIGHT: Tahir Abdullayev (21-3) vs Jefferson Nascimento (13-0)

This is not a fight between two men, this is a battle between the two sides of the sport. Jefferson Nascimento has, in theory, done everything right. He worked his way through Brazil's regional scene, he hooked up with a solid fight team, he made his way to the Legacy Fighting Alliance, battled through solid competition, and has reigned as their Lightweight champion for the last two years. He earned every part of his contract. Tahir Abdullayev lost to the last good fighter he faced. He's on a four-fight winning streak against journeymen, jobbers, and, in my personal favorite, a guy who was 2-0 against Tahir's 21 recorded bouts. He is here because he was born in Baku. He is here because he is convenient.

I will root for the soul of the sport until its embers are dead and gone. JEFFERSON NASCIMENTO BY TKO.