THE PUNCHSPORT REPORT FOR MARCH 2026
MMA is back in full swing, the Light Heavyweight title is vacant again, and somehow, Gina Carano returned.
Welcome to March. The sleepy start of the year is over, we are full speed ahead, we have multiple PFLs and half of your UFC events this year are main evented by Kevin Vallejos and Joe Pyfer, so, hey: You're welcome.
THIS MONTH’S PUNCHSPORTS EVENTS
IS THERE ANY NEWS
Yes, really. Netflix is promoting their first-ever mixed martial arts event, and it’s Ronda Rousey, who hasn’t fought in ten years, against Gina Carano, who hasn’t fought in seventeen years. It’s being promoted by Jake Paul’s sports company, it’s trying to sell out an 18,000-person stadium, and as of the start of March it’s ten weeks away and there are no other announced fights. The MMA B-leagues are in such a state that this still matters, and that’s painful to admit.
WHAT HAPPENED IN FEBRUARY
RERUN! Taking place in January and February simultaneously thanks to the magic of Australia, we had UFC 325: Volkanovski vs Lopes 2. Before the event even started we got an early entrant for funniest moment of the year when the Road to UFC's Flyweight final got scrapped after Aaron Tau got caught trying to cheat at the weigh-in and turned out to be 4 pounds over. Three of your four early prelims were the other finals, with Lawrence Lui winning a close split at Bantamweight, Keiichiro Nakamura scoring a third-round knockout at Featherweight, and Dom Mar Fan running the table at Lightweight, and the top-off was Kaan Ofli getting a, uh, questionable majority decision over Yizha. On your regular prelims, Jonathan Micallef overcame some early adversity to choke out Oban Elliott in the second, Jacob Malkoun won a decision over a barely-mobile Torrez Finney, Cameron Rowston knocked out Cody Brundage in two, and Billy Elekana choked out Junior Tafa after eight minutes. Up top, Quillan Salkilld managed to neck crank Jamie Mullarkey, Tallison Teixeira won just the saddest, gassiest decision in the world against Tai Tuivasa, Maurício Ruffy knocked out Rafael Fiziev, and Benoît Saint Denis pounded out Dan Hooker in two rounds. Your main event saw Alexander Volkanovski defending the Featherweight title against Diego Lopes, a rematch of their first fight from all of nine months prior. The first time around, Volk won a unanimous decision with two 49-46s and a 48-47; this time it was two 49-46s and a 50-45. Please stop doing unnecessary rematches. I am begging you.
The PFL got their 2026 started on February 7 with PFL Dubai: Nurmagomedov vs Davis. This marked not just the beginning of the year but the beginning of the PFL's new life as a regular, non-tournament-based MMA promotion operated by private equity, and it was a tire fire, but it wasn't their fault. The prelims were the expected mixture of local talent and stuff that matters--for every Makkasharip Zanukov decision over an Amin Ayoub you had Luke Trainer choking out Rob Wilkinson or Taylor Lapilus punching out Kasum Kasumov--but the main card had some fun surprises. Pouya Rahmani choked out Karil Williams, Salamat Isbulaev elbowed Jesus Pinedo to death and Abdoul Abdouraguimov got a decision over Kendly St. Louis, but part of their main-card placement was because a big match between Dakota Ditcheva and former Bellator title contender Denise Kielholtz got messed up when Dakota got hurt, and then replacement Antonia Silvaneide missed the Flyweight limit and the entire thing wound up on the prelims. Then the PFL inaugurated its Welterweight championship with a genuinely important matchup between final Bellator champion Ramazan Kuramagomedov and 2024 PFL tournament champion Shamil Musaev, and Kuramagomedov won, which was great right up until five minutes later when he retired during his post-fight interview, which is, in all fairness, incredibly funny. The main event was a much more boilerplate Usman Nurmagomedov win, as he defended the PFL Lightweight title after controlling and submitting 2025 tournament winner Alfie Davis in three rounds.
The evening also brought UFC Fight Night: Bautista vs Oliveira, which was a touch more normal if also decision-laden. Down on the prelims Klaudia Syguła pitched a shut-out over Priscila Cachoeira, Jakub Wikłacz choked out Muin Gafurov with one second left in the fight, Wang Cong took a decision over Eduarda Moura after they both mysteriously missed weight by the same amount (i.e.: they had an agreement), Javid Basharat beat last-minute replacement Gianni Vázquez, Ketlen Souza got the call over Bruna Brasil, Nikolay Veretennikov destroyed Niko Price in a hair under two minutes and Doniil Donchenko beat up but could not stop Alex Morono. On the main card, Dustin Jacoby knocked out Julius Walker, Farid Basharat squeaked by Jean Matsumoto with a split decision, Michał Oleksiejczuk got the duke over Marc-André Barriault, Rizvan Kuniev won a decision over Jailton Almeida who was promptly cut from the company, Kyoji Horiguchi pitched a winner against Amir Albazil, and in the main event, Mario Bautista put on an absolute grappling clinic and choked out Vinicius Oliveira.
February 13th was set aside for ONE Fight Night 40: Buntan vs Hemetsberger and I'm out of pithy things to say about how hard it is for me to keep track of ONE and their incredible distaste for mixed martial arts these days. I've been playing a lot of Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries to keep myself sane. Hu Yong knocked out Danny Kingad, Ben Tynan choked out Ryugo Takeuchi, Adrian Lee pounded out Shozo Isojima, Lucas Gabriel got a decision over Magomed Akaev and Jihin Radzuan elbowed Gabriela Fujimoto into a TKO, and I don't know if any of it will do anything. Stella Hemetsberger won ONE's Flyweight kickboxing belt off Jackie Buntan. Next month, even less.
The 21st got us UFC Fight Night: Strickland vs Hernandez and new levels of tragic nihilism. Like I rag on ONE and their cards, but does the phrase "Jacobe Smith knocked out Josiah Harrell" do anything for you? Does "Jean-Paul Lebosnoyani beat Philip Rowe" matter? Does an Adrian Lee fight mean more than a Rodolfo Bellato fight, because next month we've gotta talk about him again and I just don't know, man. I don't know. Maybe the UFC is drifting into textual highlight territory, too. maybe saying "the highlights of the prelims were Punahele Soriano beating Ramiz Brahimaj, Carlos Leal outpunching Chidi Njokuani, Alden Coria putting on a clinic against Luis Gurule and Joselyne Edwards possibly ending Nora Cornolle's career after slamming her so hard she snapped her collarbone" is more useful than going through them step by step. On the main card Michel Pereira got a decision a whole bunch of people didn't like against Zach Reese, Serghei Spivac got a decision over Ante Delija, Melquizael Costa knocked out Dan Ige, and Uroš Medić punched out Geoff Neal, which was fine, but in the main event Sean Strickland just destroyed Anthony Hernandez and knocked him out in the third round and there's a good chance I'm just still salty about it.
The salt was not fixed by UFC Fight Night: Moreno vs Kavanagh on February 28. The latest trip down to Mexico followed the same marketing pattern as most of them and had similarly mixed results. Damian Pinas destroyed Wes Scchultz, Francis Marshall strangled Erik Silva, last-minute replacement Regina Tarin outworked Ernesta Kareckaitė, Javier Reyes overcame an early scare to get a TKO over Douglas Silva de Andrade, Cristian Quiñónez got a shutout over Kris Moutinho, Ailín Pérez wrestled Macy Chiasson but good, and Ryan Gandra knocked out José Medina in under a minute. On your main card, Santiago Luna got the nod over Angel Pacheco, Imanol Rodríguez managed to stop Kevin Borjas, Édgar Cháirez got a close split over Felipe Bunes, King Green styled on Daniel Zellhuber before nuking him in the second round, and David Martínez got a decision over Marlon Vera. But the main event was the silliest part, as Lone'er Kavanagh stepped in on short notice instead of any ranked Flyweights or the man who already beat him, and as the UFC hoped, he got a unanimous decision over Brandon Moreno and now leapfrogs the entire division.
WHAT'S COMING IN MARCH
Rizin's 2026 begins on March 7 with Rizin 52, which doesn't yet have a fun event name and that makes me sad. It's a good, 13-fight card with a lot of good shit on it, although some of it is wild--living legend Hideo Tokoro is coming out of retirement at 48 to face the 10-5 24 year-old Jinnosuke Kashimura, which, like, why, man, why--Shoko Sato is facing off against John Sweeney, former Shooto Flyweight Champion Jo Arai is trying to get a win against Lee Jeung-hyun, Yusuke Yachi is back to face Kim Kyung-pyo, Karshyga Dautbek is meeting Ryuya Fukuda, Viktor Kolesnik is up against Kazuki Aimoto, Taisei Sakuraba is getting another big career test against Luiz Gustavo, Saori Oshima is facing off with Kate Oyama to potentially contend with Seika Izawa, and in the main event, Kyoma Akimoto is fighting the just-released-by-the-UFC Patchy Mix, who desperately needs to get his groove back.
Your first UFC of the month is also on the 7th and it is UFC 326: Holloway vs Oliveira 2, a card that can be best described as Not Bad, Just Weird. Drew Dober vs Michael Johnson could have happened in 2009 and instead it's happening in 2026, and that's weird. Brunno Ferreira was going to fight former title contender Paulo Costa and instead it's Gregory "Robocop" Rodrigues, and that's weird. Raul Rosas Jr. was supposed to fight Rob Font last year for a top ten ranking, and Font lost in his replacement bout and they just rebooked the fight again, and that's weird. Caio Borralho is fighting Reinier de Ridder, and a few months ago that would've been a title eliminator and now it's a desperate attempt to hang onto the top ten, and boy, that's weird. But Max Holloway vs Charles Oliveira, an incredible rematch almost eleven years in the making, being put on solely for the fake BMF vanity belt they invented to sell shoes? That's fucking weird.
ONE Fight Night 41: Rodrigues vs Phetjeeja happens on March 13 and there's two MMA matches on it and one of them is the debuting Fábio Henrique vs Lee Seung Chul, who is on a four-fight winning streak in ONE, and the other is the 11-9 Jeremy Miado, who is 1 for his last 6, against Willie van Rooyen, who made his debut last November, lost, and is rebooked anyway. Please stop. I am asking you, Chatri, to stop.
The 14th gets us UFC Fight Night: Emmett vs Vallejos, which returns is back to the godsforsaken Apex for incredible matchups like Piera Rodriguez and Sam Hughes being rewarded for having multiple-fight winning streaks by having to fight each other to curtain-jerk Apex prelims and every day we stray farther from any form of meaning. Charles Johnson vs Bruno Silva despite Johnson having been knocked out a month and a half ago. Vitor Petrino and Steven Asplund are having a borderline-ranked Heavyweight bout but it's under the debuting Marwan Rahiki vs Harry Hardwick, who got completely destroyed in his one and only UFC fight. Amanda Lemos, the former title challenger and #5 Women's Strawweight in the world, is facing Gillian Robertson, who is on a giant winning streak and testing herself as a top contender, and that's an Apex co-main event because the actual main is the 1-for-5 Josh Emmett vs Kevin Vallejos, who has been here for one year.
On March 20, it's back to the PFL for PFL Madrid: van Steenis vs Edwards 2. The prelims are one of those zero-Wikipedia-page specials, which is unfortunate because Victoria Dudakova deserves better and I hope she beats Jacinta Austin because I would appreciate it, but other than that your most notable undercard fight is, like, Gino van Steenis vs Mark Ewen and that's deeply unfortunate. Up top Linton Vassell is facing Denis Goltsov for tournament leftover pride, Franco Tenaglia and Yassin Najid get the 'who are you' fight of the night, Alexandr Shabliy faces Acoidan Duque, A.J. McKee has decided to stick around at Featherweight to take on Ádám Borics, and in your main event Middleweight champion Costello van Steenis runs it back with Fabian Edwards, whom he beat by split decision in Bellator back in 2020.
One day later we're off to London for UFC Fight Night: Evloev vs Murphy and it, too, is a bizarrely constructed card to the point that it's like the UFC's matchmaking engine is simply shitting itself to death. Mário Pinto is an undefeated Heavyweight prospect on a two-fight knockout streak in the UFC: He is on the prelims against the debuting Felipe Franco. Antonio Trócoli is on his third straight loss, so he's booked above him against Mantas Kondratavičius. Nathaniel Wood vs Losene Keita and Mason Jones vs Axel Sola are on the prelims, but Kutis Campbell vs Danny Silva and Iwo Baraniewski vs Austen Lane are on the main card. Michael "Venom" Page, ranked at Welterweight despite being on a Middleweight winning streak, is back at 170 to fight the unranked Sam Patterson, which is less important than co-main event Luke Riley vs Michael Aswell, and all of this is second fiddle to Movsar Evloev vs Lerone Murphy even though both of them already deserve a title shot.
But we're right back to the PFL on the 28th for PFL Pittsburgh: Eblen vs Battle, which is, believe it or not, the first PFL event in America since August of last year. Josh Fremd is back! He's fighting Jarrah Al-Silawi on the prelims alongside such old friends as Dakota Bush vs Robert Watley, Elora Dana vs Tatiana Postarnakova, Nathan Schulte vs Jakub Kaszuba and Bryce Meredith vs Jack Cartwright among others. On your main card, you get the joys of Lazaro Dayron vs Jacob Thrall, Julio Arce vs Alexei Pergande, Ariane da Silva making her PFL debut against Sumiko Inaba and Impa Kasanganay against Dalton Rosta, and in your main event, former champ Johnny Eblen faces promotional newcome Bryan Battle.
And finally, the 28th also nets UFC Fight Night: Adesanya vs Pyfer, and I gotta tell you, man, Israel Adesanya is obviously still a superstar of the sport, but "Johnny Eblen main event" vs "Joe Pyfer main event" is really, really philosophically close in my head. Michael Chiesa vs Carlston Harris! Chase Hooper vs Lance Gibson Jr.! Terrance McKinney and Kyle Nelson? Marcin Tybura plays footsy with Valter Walker? Alexa Grasso and Maycee Barber will have a fight, I guess! I just cannot get over the sentence "Israel Adesanya vs Joe Pyfer" and depending on how it goes, I may never.
CURRENT UFC CHAMPIONS
Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs
Tom Aspinall - 15-3 (1), Either 1, 2 or 0 Defenses Depending On How You Look At It
You know, once upon a time, the UFC would’ve killed for a Tom Aspinall. Entire years of UFC events were spent desperately trying to get a Dan Hardy or Darren Till or Jimi Manuwa into championship pictures so they could cash in on UK superstardom. And somehow, Tom Aspinall just fell into their lap. They didn’t go out of their way to softball him, they didn’t put a ton of effort into marketing him, they just let him mulch everyone in his path. In 2025, Tallison Teixeira has a main event in just his second UFC bout: In 2022 Tom Aspinall had to notch five straight stoppages to get his first crack at the top of the card against Curtis Blaydes, and it ended with his knee imploding fifteen seconds into the fight. When he lost that fight, Francis Ngannou was the reigning UFC Heavyweight Champion of the World. By the time Tom returned in the Summer of 2023, it belonged to Jon fucking Jones. Within one fight Aspinall was a top contender again, and with Jon comically scheduled to defend his title against Stipe Miocic, who hadn’t fought in two and a half years, Aspinall was left in a holding pattern--until Jon injured himself in training. With barely two weeks to prepare, Tom Aspinall fought Sergei Pavlovich for an interim championship. Sergei was the most devastating knockout artist in the Heavyweight division: Tom knocked him out in sixty-nine seconds. Not only did it give him gold, it gave him a golden ticket. The sole purpose of an interim champion is to one day reunify the belts, and that meant Tom had a shot at Jon Jones, one of the biggest fighters in the history of the sport. All he had to do was wait. And wait. And wait. Tom waited so fucking long the UFC made him defend his interim title in a rematch with Blaydes--which he won easily, knocking him out in 60 seconds--on July 27, 2024. Four months later, Jon Jones returned and had his fight with Stipe, who by that point had been effectively retired for almost four years. Unsurprisingly, Jon won. Equally unsurprisingly, Jon and the UFC refused to commit to fighting Aspinall. Jones reportedly held the UFC up for a huge payday, and when they shockingly agreed, he changed his mind. In the end, the most obvious pair of conclusions happened: On June 21st, during the press conference after Fight Night Baku, Dana White announced Jon was retiring and Tom was being promoted to Undisputed Champion; an hour later, coincidentally, news broke that Jon was being summoned for arraignment in July on charges of leaving the scene of an accident after drunkenly crashing another car and leaving another heavily-inebriated half-naked woman behind in it and also threatening the police over the phone when they called him. It is the only way the Jon Jones story could possibly have ended. Tom Aspinall was an interim champion for 588 days, and he made his first undisputed one against Ciryl Gane at UFC 321 on October 26--and, because this division is fucking cursed, it ended in a No Contest after Gane poked him in both of his eyes at once. The UFC has decided this is mostly Tom’s fault, which has nothing at all to do with Tom’s dad talking about how he shouldn’t sign a new contract. A rematch has been vowed, but Tom needs literal eye surgery to regain his sight. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get an interim bout. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they strip him because He Just Didn’t Want To Fight.
Light Heavyweight Champion, 205 lbs
VACANT - Where we all go when we’re gone
For the last several months, this section has included the phrase “As it turns out, (Alex) Pereira doesn’t seem to have much interest in defending the 205-pound title at all. The second he won the belt he went about trying to manifest his next fight: A Heavyweight clash with Jon Jones at the UFC’s White House card in July.” Hey, y’all: Guess what happened. On February 27 the UFC announced Pereira was dropping the title, the scuttlebutt is they’re going to do either Pereira vs Jones or Ciryl Gane for a Heavyweight belt at the White House, and the new main event of UFC 327 in April will be Jiří Procházka vs Carlos Ulberg for the vacant belt. The UFC Light Heavyweight Championship has been vacated (to be clear: vacated, not stripped or we’d just be talking about Jon Jones again) six times in its almost thirty-year history: Five of those times happened in the last eight years and three of them were in the last three and a half. The new champion will be either a man who got knocked out by Alex Pereira twice or a man who got his title shot by beating 2025 Dominick Reyes. Existing in the Nothing Matters era of the sport sure is fun.
Middleweight Champion, 185 lbs
Khamzat Chimaev - 15-0, 0 Defenses
Yeah, this was probably inevitable. When Khamzat Chimaev showed up in the UFC in the middle of the Fight Island pandemic era and wrecked two people in ten days at two different weight classes, the world was prepared to believe he was special. When he ended Gerald Meerschaert with one punch less than two months later, all doubt was cast aside. The fighters, the audience, and the UFC itself were all true believers in the championship future that lay ahead for Khamzat Chimaev. Khamzat, in response, retired from mixed martial arts. As it turns out, fighting in the middle of a COVID pandemic makes it more likely you’re going to get COVID. Who’dve thunk? After a year, some prodding from Dana White and reportedly a lot more personal prodding from Ramzan Kadyrov, the dictator in charge of Khamzat’s native Chechen Republic, Khamzat returned to the sport a year later. His dominance continued unabated, but his schedule never recovered--in fact, it worsened. After a particularly unfortunate 2022 episode involving Khamzat torpedoing his own pay-per-view main event against Nate Diaz after missing weight by almost ten pounds and very nearly cancelling the event altogether, he instead wound up strangling Kevin Holland, taking another year off, moving permanently to Middleweight, and adopting a new schedule whereby he fought only once every twelve months, and every time he appeared, something bizarre would happen. In the first episode of New Khamzat he showed up in 2023 for what was supposed to be a long-awaited showdown with Paulo Costa, but Costa, as he is wont to do, pulled out and resulted in Welterweight champion Kamaru Usman stepping in with just days to prepare. Even weirder: He gave Khamzat the closest fight he’d ever had. One judge scored the fight a damn draw. Khamzat’s struggle with a career Welterweight gave a lot of folks pause when, one year later, he returned to face Middleweight kingpin Robert Whittaker. Rob was universally respected as one of the best 185-pound fighters in UFC history, and while he’d lost, he’d lost only to the best and never easily. Khamzat steamrolled him in three and a half minutes. He face-cranked him so hard it snapped a previous palate injury and left Rob’s bottom teeth floating in his mouth. By the time Khamzat came back in 2025 for his long-awaited shot at the belt, Dricus du Plessis had etched his spot in the record books as one of just five men to ever defend the Middleweight championship multiple times. He’d beaten everyone the UFC put in front of him, and he was still a betting underdog. The conventional wisdom was Khamzat would choke Dricus out in the first two rounds or Dricus would drag him through a difficult back half of the bout. As it turned out: Everyone was wrong. Khamzat did hand out one of the most one-sided championship victories in UFC history, but rather than destroying Dricus, he just outwrestled him for five straight rounds. He didn’t engage on the feet, he didn’t land much in the way of heavy ground-and-pound, and he isn’t even credited with a single submission attempt. Khamzat landed 529 strikes and only 37 of them were considered significant. But Khamzat won, unquestionably and easily, and now he has the belt everyone long assumed he’d get. It looks like he’ll be defending the belt against Nassourdine Imavov, but not until after Ramadan.
Welterweight Champion, 170 lbs
Islam Makhachev - 28-1, 0 Defenses
The prophecy has been fulfilled. Khabib Nurmagomedov was considered by many to be the greatest Lightweight of all time, but in the later stages of his career he began to repeatedly reference his lifetime friend and training partner Islam Makhachev as not just his successor, but the man who would break the mold he’d left behind. And the fanbase was more than willing to buy another Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov protege coming in and wrecking shop--until he got knocked out by Adriano Martins. Khabib’s aura of invulnerability came from the simple, so-obvious-more-people-should-try-it factor of simply never losing a damn fight. When Islam got torched in under two minutes by a man that couldn’t beat Donald Cerrone, that aura vanished. A lot of folks still thought he could be a champion, but most felt the greatest-of-all-time lane was closed to him. It turns out there’s another way to regain that sense of unbeatable awe, though: Just don’t lose for so goddamn long people forget it ever happened. In the ten full years since that Martins bout, Islam has not lost a single fight. Most of the time, he hasn’t even lost a round. He worked his way up the Lightweight ladder and began to rack up incredible achievements. He tore through top prospects with virtually no effort, he choked out one of the best MMA grapplers ever in Charles Oliveira, he outlasted and later knocked out one of the two men with a claim to the all-time Featherweight crown in Alexander Volkanovski, he choked out Dustin Poirier and he broke the Lightweight title defense record after stomping Renato Moicano. And then he traded in his record-breaking reign to challenge for Welterweight gold. Jumping divisions is always difficult, but the 15-pound leap from Lightweight to Welterweight is a mountain, and no Lightweight champion had ever managed it. Even BJ Penn, the canonical first man to hold gold at both, had to do it in reverse: He failed at both of his attempts to win Lightweight gold and shocked the world by abruptly taking it at Welterweight instead, and it would be five more years before he finally got his shit together and won a title in the division that made him famous. His subsequent attempts all ended in defeat, half because Matt Hughes and Georges St-Pierre were both great and half because BJ was just a Lightweight. Even though Islam was Islam and widely agreed to be a monster in the cage, Jack Della Maddalena had won the Welterweight title with some of the cleanest boxing the UFC had seen, and his championship victory over wrestler Belal Muhammad had people convinced that Islam, at best, would struggle. They met in the main event of UFC 322 on November 15, 2025, and there was absolutely no struggle. Islam kicked Jack’s leg to pieces, landed some surprisingly big punches, and took the fight to the ground almost at will, and by the time the fight ended, it felt like Jack never had a chance. The shadow has been stepped out of. Islam Makhachev is a two-division champion. And now he has a brand new horde of contenders beating down his door.
Lightweight Champion, 155 lbs
Ilia Topuria - 17-0, 0 Defenses
One of the most exciting things about following mixed martial arts is picking which prospects you really, truly believe in. There are hundreds of fighters across history that you will enjoy watching, and you may have some hopes for their future, but you don’t necessarily expect the world from them. When Ilia Topuria showed up in the UFC in 2020, if you were paying attention, you knew he was going to be special. The combination of wrestling, grappling and absolutely murderous striking was almost immediately visible, but what really set him apart was the unshakable confidence with which he used it. Even when he went up to 155 pounds on short notice and almost got knocked out by Jai Herbert he survived the onslaught, recovered, came right back at him as though he was utterly unfazed and destroyed Herbert seconds later. That was the truly exceptional danger of Ilia Topuria: His belief in his technique was so absurdly complete that it came across as absurdly silly arrogance and it made huge swaths of the audience disdain him and then he’d somehow always find a way to just go do the damn thing anyway. He outgrappled Ryan Hall. He submitted Bryce Mitchell. He beat Josh Emmett so badly he got a 50-42 scorecard out of it. And on February 17, 2024, he ended Alexander Volkanovski’s historic, nearly-four-year reign as the king of Featherweight by knocking him out in two rounds. When Ilia followed that up by saying he was going to become the first man to ever knock out Max Holloway--a thing Volkanovski, Dustin Poirier, José Aldo and Conor McGregor failed to do--even with his title victory, the audience was still particularly skeptical. He did it anyway. Once again, Ilia walked into a fight with supreme confidence, and once again, it ended with his opponent on the floor, this time in three rounds. Ilia Topuria had knocked out the two greatest Featherweights of the generation and seemed poised for a longer title reign than either of them. And then he quit the division. One of those first overconfident boasts of his had been the desire to move up to Lightweight and knock out Islam Makhachev to become a double champion. The MMA world thought he was talking about a far-away future, but he wanted it and he wanted it now. Unfortunately, so did Islam. Right as Ilia vacated the Featherweight title to move up to Lightweight, Islam vacated the Lightweight title to move up to Welterweight. So Ilia was left to fight for his destiny against Charles Oliveira instead. Oliveira’s always been incredibly tough and dangerous, and he hadn’t been knocked out in almost eight years, and even then it wasn’t unconsciousness but rather because a Paul Felder elbow had broken part of his face. That streak ended on June 28, 2025 when Ilia Topuria punched him limp in two and a half minutes. The UFC may not do double-champions anymore out of sheer promotional frustration, but in any rational sense, Ilia is the king of Featherweight and Lightweight, which gives him a horde of contenders like Arman Tsarukyan, Justin Gaethje, Dan Hooker and Mateusz Gamrot. So he appears to be fighting Paddy Pimblett next. If you ask Ilia, he’s just killing time until Islam wins the Welterweight title, because his destiny is to take his 5’7” frame all the way up to Welterweight so he can kill the king and be the first ever three-division champion in UFC history. Does it sound aggressively silly and arrogant? Of course it does. Do you feel comfortable ruling it out? Then you haven’t been paying attention. Ilia is, however, dealing with some personal issues related to his divorce, so he’s going to be out of action until the Spring, which means the UFC made an interim title bout between Justin Gaethje and Paddy Pimblett for UFC 324 on January 24. Yes, really. How’d that one wind up going, you ask?
Interim Lightweight Champion
Justin Gaethje - 27-5, 0 Defenses
One of the foundational subjective mixed martial arts questions, right alongside ‘who’s the pound-for-pound best’ and ‘what if Cro-Cop ducked that kick,’ is ‘Who’s the best fighter to never win a championship?’ There are different answers for every generation, and one of the complicating factors is the inevitable debate over whether interim titles count. Was Carlos Condit a UFC champion? What about Colby Covington or Yair Rodríguez? It’s still an incredible achievement, but it’s just not quite real the way an undisputed title is. And I cannot imagine what sort of a backhanded career accomplishment it is to be the only person in UFC history to win their division’s interim title twice. Justin Gaethje has been right on the edge of the top for so long he’s got two half-championships in his closet. Back in 2020 he fought Tony Ferguson, then arguably the scariest Lightweight in the world, and beat him so horrifically that his career never recovered, and that netted Gaethje his first interim belt, which he promptly lost to Khabib Nurmagomedov in the latter’s retirement bout. Two years later, Gaethje got his second shot at the undisputed title against Charles Oliveira and he wound up strangled in three and a half minutes. Three and a half years after that, Gaethje was still right there at the precipice of the top, Ilia Topuria needed a break from the sport, and the UFC needed an aging veteran to propel their marketing star Paddy Pimblett to the top, and at UFC 324 on January 24, 2026, they threw Paddy’s big party and Justin crashed it. The UFC will tell you the fight was close, and it was in the sense that it went the whole way and one judge only gave Justin three rounds, but Paddy got brutally beaten and dropped repeatedly. Once again, Justin Gaethje is the interim champion. It just remains to be seen what the hell they’ll do now.
Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs
Alexander Volkanovski - 28-4, 1 Defense
And just like that, 2024 never happened. For eleven years Alexander Volkanovski was the best Featherweight on the planet, and most of that time was simply waiting for everyone else to notice. He was short and he won by decisions a lot and the world was entirely into Max Holloway so he skated under the radar right up until the moment he finally beat Max. And that wasn’t enough to convince people, so Volkanovski beat him again. And that somehow made the world doubt him even more, so he beat Max a third time. By 2023 Volk was second only to all-time great José Aldo in Featherweight title defenses--and he’d beaten Aldo in a fight, and his only actual loss was an all-timer of an effort against Islam Makhachev that still stands as the closest Islam has come to losing his title as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, so it was very, very easy to accept Alexander Volkanovski as the greatest Featherweight on the planet. And then he took a rematch with Islam with only one week to prepare and got knocked out in three minutes, and then he came back less than four months later and got flattened by Ilia Topuria, and in the space of two fights the audience went from celebrating him as the best around to calling for his retirement. Volkanovski took an entire year off to heal and rebuild, which was enough time for Ilia to get bored and vacate the belt to go chase Lightweight greatness, and the Topuria/Volkanovski rematch became Volkanovski vs Diego Lopes at UFC 314 on April 12 to fill the vacant throne instead. It was somehow both close and clear. Lopes gained steam in the middle stanza of the bout and at one point dropped Volk, but Volk got right back up and resumed punching him in the face, and by the end of the bout he’d outlanded him more than two to one. The judges sided with him, the audience sided with him, and Alexander Volkanovski became not just one of the rare few to win back a UFC title, but the first man over 35 to ever win a UFC belt in the sub-170 weight classes typically reserved for young lions. His logical next contender should’ve been Movsar Evloev, but the UFC was busy trying to get him to fight an unranked, debuting Aaron Pico, thus clearing the way for a rematch with Yair Rodríguez in Guadalajara for Noche UFC 3 in September. Except the Arena Guadalajara wasn’t done yet, so Noche UFC 3 got moved to the most Mexican of places, Las Vegas, in October, and Alex’s manager said he had an eye injury that needs time to heal, so he took the rest of 2025 off. Good news, though: That left time for the UFC to get new contenders going. Lerone Murphy wound up fighting and knocking out Pico! Aljamain Sterling beat Brian Ortega! Hell, Movsar Evloev is still right there! The UFC looked at all of them and gave them all the finger. At UFC 325 on January 31, fresh off his title victory over Diego Lopes, Alexander Volkanovski had his first title defense against Diego Lopes. Unsurprisingly, the guy who beat Diego Lopes beat Diego Lopes again. The UFC’s going to have Evloev and Murphy fight in March, and presumably the winner’s got next.
Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs
Petr Yan - 20-5, 0 Defenses
Petr Yan’s road to the top has been incredibly circuitous. When Yan initially won the Bantamweight title back in 2020, no one was particularly surprised. He’d been one of the best in the world for years, he’d put together a six-fight winning streak on his road to the title shot, and the UFC had fed aging legend Urijah Faber to him in an attempt to make him a known quantity. Felling an even greater legend in José Aldo and taking the belt felt like an entirely expected passing of the torch, and a long reign as the division’s standardbearer seemed all but assured. And then, as they so often do, things went wrong. In quite possibly the most infamous title change in UFC history, Yan became the first champion to ever lose his title by disqualification after drilling Aljamain Sterling in the face with an illegal knee. Yan’s team cried foul and the world turned on Sterling, but when they had their rematch a year later, Sterling beat him by decision and that was that. But it was a split decision, and it was close, so the UFC gave Yan another theoretical title eliminator with Sean O’Malley, and this time the world was almost unanimously convinced Yan won--except for two of the three judges, who split in O’Malley’s favor. To top it off, Yan’s attempt to stay in the contendership conversation ran into the brick wall that was the rising Merab Dvalishvili, who handed him the most one-sided loss of his entire life. In the space of two years, Petr Yan went from being perceived as a generational champion to 1 for his last 5 and seemingly eliminated from contendership. After a year off to cope with injuries, reassess his career and figure out how to turn things around, Yan proceeded to take the path that most commonly leads to success: Just fucking beating everyone. He battered Song Yadong, he outpunched Deiveson Figueiredo, he won an exceedingly weirdly-booked matchup with Marcus McGhee, and suddenly, he was on a winning streak and right back in contendership. It might have taken him longer to get an actual title fight were it not for Merab Dvalishvili being a crazy person. Merab was on the greatest championship run the division had ever seen, and after clearing out most of his to contenders and recording a blistering three defenses in a single year, he announced his intention to break a UFC record and cement himself as the greatest 135-pounder of all time by recording a fourth--just two months after the last one--and Petr Yan was available and ready. The world saw the fight as a foregone conclusion, given how one-sided their first match had been, and the world was wrong. Yan put on the best performance of his career, not just battering Merab but outwrestling him, and in one of the best career comebacks we’ve seen, almost five years after he’d given it away, Petr Yan got his title back. He’s on top of the world again, and in all likelihood, the rubber match with Merab will be next. But it’s gonna have to wait until the second half of the year, because Yan’s having back surgery.
Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs
Joshua Van - 16-2, 0 Defenses
It would be disrespectful as hell to Joshua Van to say that no one saw this coming, as many people perceived it as a possibility, but I don’t think anyone saw it coming like this. Van was the Flyweight champion of the Fury Fighting Championships when the UFC came calling, as a 21 year-old regional titleholder with a penchant for collecting knockouts despite fighting at 125 pounds so thoroughly ticks all of their boxes that Van couldn’t have been a more perfect fit without also having a history of racist tweets, and his Contender Series debut was set for August of 2023. But the UFC needed someone to fill in against Zhalgas Zhumagulov, so Van got called up to the big show early and proceeded to justify their faith by beating Zhalgas, and then beating the man he was originally slated to Contend against, and then facing off with Legacy Fighting Alliance champ Felipe Bunes and handing him the first TKO loss of his entire career. In the space of six months, Van went from a little-known regional fighter to a borderline-ranked Flyweight in the UFC. And then he got atomized by Charles Johnson. It was the second loss of Van’s career, the first time he’d ever been knocked out, and the snapping of an eight-fight winning streak, and in many cases, that would’ve permanently ended his momentum. But Van was smart enough to learn from his mistakes, and the UFC was invested enough in him to bring him back up to speed with a gentle hand, and eleven months later he was on a four-fight winning streak again and had successfully made his way to the top ten after knocking out Bruno Silva, which left him in the perfect position to take advantage of an abrupt opportunity. Top contender Brandon Royval had just lost his opponent and needed a replacement, and Van was game to fight for the second time in three weeks if it meant a shot at the belt. It was a close bout, and if Van hadn’t knocked Royval down at the end of the third round he may well have lost, but he did, so he didn’t, and suddenly the prospect was next in line for the title. All but one month of Joshua Van’s UFC career took place during Alexandre Pantoja’s reign as the Flyweight king. His streak was monstrous and he was a sizable favorite coming into his defense against Van, but many were waiting to see if Van’s boxing could defuse Pantoja’s aggression. As it turns out: We’re gonna have to wait a bit longer. Twenty-six seconds into the bout Pantoja busted his own arm on the mat after a head kick gone awry. So Van’s the champion, but it’s under some real weird circumstances, and it means a number of people are immediately gunning for him. Alexandre Pantoja presumably has a rematch as soon as he’s back, but in the meantime, Tatsuro Taira just pounded Brandon Moreno out to make himself a top contender and he’s going to get his crack at Van at UFC 327 on April 11.
Women’s Bantamweight, 135 lbs
Kayla Harrison - 19-1, 0 Defenses
Every once in awhile the inevitable turns out to actually be inevitable. Ronda Rousey parlayed a 2008 bronze medal in Judo into mixed martial arts stardom; Kayla Harrison took the gold medal in 2012 and 2016. The world was already asking her about MMA before the second. The UFC made a play for her, but there was a problem: By the standards of female fighters Kayla was huge. Ronda had competed at 70 kg in the Olympics, which translated to about 154 pounds, well within the range of weight cutting for the insane standards of combat sports and Women’s Bantamweight. Kayla competed at 78 kg, which was almost 172 pounds. Even at a twenty-pound weight cut, her division simply did not exist in major mixed martial arts organizations. So she had to find one that would build it. The Professional Fighters League needed star power, and Kayla was their gal. They founded the first Women’s Lightweight division in a major American organization, and it was populated mostly by Bantamweights and Featherweights who were trying the best they could. For four straight years, Kayla was their recurring, undefeated champion. She won the 2019 and 2021 tournaments, and in 2022 she made it to the finals and looked poised to take it for a third time, as her only competition was Larissa Pacheco, whom she’d already beaten twice. In a massive upset, Larissa took a decision off of her. It was shocking, it was unexpected, and it was also more or less fine, because Kayla was more or less done with the PFL. She took one more fight against Aspen Ladd as a one-off, but her future was with the UFC. Even with her loss to Pacheco, the world was sure she was a future UFC champion--as long as she could stomach the weight cut. And it did, visibly, kill her! But she made it. She choked out Holly Holm in her debut, she took a decision over Ketlen Vieira in a title eliminator, and all she had to do after that was wait. Julianna Peña was a +500 underdog in her own title defense against Kayla, and that turned out to be just about right. On June 7, 2025, at UFC 316, Kayla achieved the inevitable, ragdolled Peña and tapped her out in just two rounds. She’s the best in the world and she’s going to get her shot at the superfight everyone wanted in the first place, as Amanda Nunes is coming out of retirement to face her later this year--actually, this got delayed so much it’s only now finally booked for UFC 324 on January 24, 2026--maybe never? A couple weeks before the superfight Kayla had to pull out for apparently fairly major neck surgery. No word on when she’ll be back or what on Earth happens now.
Women’s Flyweight, 125 lbs
Valentina Shevchenko - 26-4-1, 2 Defenses
After almost two years of suffering, we have gone back to the start. At the end of 2022 Valentina Shevchenko was so thoroughly ensconced as The Greatest Women’s Flyweight that a sizable segment of the fanbase had built an honest-to-god antipathy for her over it. Sure, she won, all the time, and sure, her only losses in almost a decade and a half came to the greatest of all time in Amanda Nunes, and sure, Shevchenko arguably won their second fight, but familiarity breeds contempt, and after watching the purported greatest struggle with a split decision to Taila Santos that could easily have gone the other way, too, a big chunk of the mixed martial world was ready to move on from Val. And then, unexpectedly, it did. Valentina was a -900 favorite when Alexa Grasso shocked the world, choked her out, and took her title away on March 4, 2023. An instant rematch was obligatory, given Val’s long history on top, so half a year later they ran it back at Noche UFC in 2023, and, awkwardly, it ended in a draw. If the rematch had been obligatory, the threematch was mandatory, but a hand injury on Val’s part and the UFC’s desire to put an entire season of The Ultimate Fighter behind their promotion meant a full twelve months passed before they got back in the cage. That’s a long goddamn time, and it left a lot of air, and that air was filled by doubt. Alexa won the first fight, after all--but she was on her way to losing a decision before Valentina made a costly mistake, threw one of her trademark nowhere-close-to-landing spinning back kicks, and got immediately jumped on and choked out for her troubles. Alexa didn’t lose the second fight--but based on the scorecards, she should have, and would have, were it not for one judge handing her a completely indefensible 10-8 in the final round. When the third fight came on September 14, 2024, it was seen as Alexa’s chance to cement her legacy: Either she was the superior fighter and the herald of a new generation for Women’s Flyweight, or the whole thing was just a weird episode. Unfortunately for Alexa, it was the latter. Valentina dominated her. She outstruck her and outwrestled her with almost comical ease, the fight was a complete shutout, and despite their series being now tied at 1-1-1, no one has any doubts about the winner, nor any desire to see them fight again. Once again, much to the internet’s chagrin, Valentina Shevchenko is a champion. And--only two years late--she defended her title against Manon Fiorot at UFC 315. It was close, it was contentious, and it was also a fight the audience does not want to see again. Her next fight was a long-awaited champion vs champion affair against Zhang Weili at UFC 322 on November 15, 2025. After years of watching Zhang dominate her competition, the world felt she had genuine double-champ potential and could be the woman to unseat Valentina. As it turned out: Not even close. Val dominated her in every aspect of the game, Zhang got completely shut out, and her Flyweight hopes are dead in the water. Valentina has multiple title defenses again and is now tied with Amanda Nunes and Anderson Silva for the fourth-most wins in title fights in UFC history. We’ll have to see who they give to her next, but Natália Silva feels like a safe bet.
Women’s Strawweight, 115 lbs
Mackenzie Dern - 16-5, 0 Defenses
On a long enough timeline, the house always wins. Mackenzie Dern signed with the UFC as a 5-0 fighter all the way back in 2018 and they’ve been trying to get a belt on her ever since. She came into mixed martial arts with a pre-existing pedigree as one of the more decorated women in the history of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: Gi championships, no-gi championships, pan-Am championships, Asian open championships, world championships, ADCC championships, she took them all. And the UFC marketed her as a grappling champion who was bringing some of the best submission offense in the sport to the Strawweight division! But they also marketed her as an extremely conventionally attractive woman who frequently wore bathing suits. It was one of the touchiest things to comment on with her career: Where other women would have to struggle for their matchmaking and featured spots, Mackenzie’s opportunities kept coming, and they were almost always on the main broadcast and, on multiple occasions, in the main event slots women almost never received. And she needed them, because despite being legitimately quite good, she just wasn’t great. She could make it into the top fifteen, and sometimes even brush the top ten, but every time they tried to get Mackenzie into title contention, she’d falter. It was Amanda Ribas in 2019, it was Marina Rodriguez in 2021, and between 2022 and 2024, Mackenzie had the worst run of her life, winning only one out of four bouts, getting shut down by Yan Xiaonan and Amanda Lemos, and taking the first stoppage loss of her career after being knocked out by Jéssica Andrade. She managed to get her way back up the ladder again by outgrappling Loopy Godinez and submitting a struggling Amanda Ribas in a six-years-belated rematch, but with so many losses to top contenders, her path to the title still seemed closed. Then a funny thing happened: Zhang Weili gave up the Strawweight belt to move up to Flyweight and challenge Valentina Shevchenko. Suddenly, the door was wide open. And conveniently, the UFC had booked all the women who beat Mackenzie into other matches, leaving Mackenzie with just one contender left--and it was Virna Jandiroba, a career grappler whom Mackenzie had already beaten back in 2020. The two met at UFC 321 on October 25, and after seven years of effort, the UFC finally got its way. Mackenzie beat Virna again, fair and square, in a close and hard-fought but ultimately clear decision. She is, at last, the Strawweight Champion of the World. And she’s in the exceptionally weird position of being a newly-minted champion that has very recently lost to several of her own top contenders. If Zhang Weili fails to beat Valentina Shevchenko, it’s very likely the UFC will try to pressure her back down to 115 for a money match with Mackenzie, in which case Dern would almost certainly be a big underdog in her own first defense. If not, at this point, it’s either a rematch with Yan Xiaonan, a grappling match with Tatiana Suarez, or the UFC stops pretending entirely and has Mackenzie beat Contender Series women until she turns a profit.
NOTABLE CHAMPIONS ACROSS THE WORLD
Rizin Lightweight Champion, 156 lbs
Ilkhom Nazimov - 13-3, 0 Defenses
After four and a half years we finally have the second-ever Rizin Lightweight Champion, and it feels a little bit like he came out of nowhere. Up until the 2025 New Year’s event, most folks had only seen one Ilkhom Nazimov fight. He’d been operating out in the Russian regional scene, which has the unfortunate crossover of being a) low-visibility and b) notoriously tough, and no matter how good you are, there just isn’t going to be a lot of international broadcast attention on the Tyumen Extreme Sports Expo. Nazimov didn’t get his first real taste of the spotlight until he made it to UAE Warriors, one of the biggest leagues in the middle east; unfortunately, that spotlight included him getting knocked out in eight seconds. Despite the loss, Rizin was in need of locally-appealing talent for their 2023 foray into Azerbaijan--for the folks who aren’t into flags out there, Nazimov’s representing Uzbekistan--and Nazimov was present, ready, and more than capable of beating “The Crazy Cameroonian” Jaures Dea. It was a good win, but it was also on Rizin’s Landmark series, the lesser-advertised prospect showcases. He’d get pulled up to the main show long enough to pound out Sora Yamamoto, but demoted back down to Landmark duty for a win over Sugaru Nii. Those three wins were enough to get him booked for 2025’s New Year’s special--but against the man they call Blackpanther Beynoah, a 5-3 Lightweight. It wasn’t until DEEP champion and Japanese prospect Shunta Nomura had to pull out of his championship bout with Roberto de Souza that Nazimov got his shot at the belt. Given Souza’s years of dominance as the only man to hold the belt in Rizin’s history, Nazimov’s status as a relative unknown and the short-notice nature of his move up the card, the odds were both figuratively and literally against him. He intercepted a de Souza takedown with a knee and knocked him cold in thirteen seconds. However unknown he was last week, he’s one of the most visible Lightweights in the world now.
Rizin Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs
Razhabali Shaydullaev - 17-0, 2 Defenses
I asked how long the second reign of Kleber Koike Erbst would last, and as it turns out, the answer was sixty-two seconds. Razhabali Shaydullaev’s rise through the sport has been impressively meteoric. Four years ago he was a rookie fighting on Batyr Bashy cards in Kyrgyzstan as a predominantly grappling-based fighter. Three years ago he was disposing of journeymen in the developmental leagues of Russia’s Absolute Championship Akhmat. Two years ago he was choking out top contenders in South Korea’s Road FC. One year ago he got signed to Rizin. In just six months he choked out a DEEP champion, submitted a Bellator champion and smashed through a K-1 Kickboxing champion with virtually no resistance. He was the favorite against Erbst, but few thought it would be an easy night, with Erbst having been finished only once in his entire career, and even that was an armbar all the way back in 2009 when he was still a rookie. Shaydullaev, as he has been doing for the entirety of his run thus far, destroyed Erbst. He walked through him and flattened him in just barely over a minute. Rizin’s got another gaijin champion, and given how good he’s looked, they may be stuck with him for awhile--or, worse, they might lose him to the UFC sooner than later. With Mikuru Asakura’s victory over Chihiro Suzuki on the same night he’s the logical next contender, but that would just be stupid, so instead it was Shaydullaev making his first defense against Viktor Kolesnik at Rizin 51 on September 28: He knocked Kolesnik out in just thirty-three seconds. His successful murders got him the main event of 2025’s Japanese New Year’s MMA special, where Rizin secretly hoped their big national star Mikuru Asakura would get the job done; Shaydullaev chain-suplexed him, grounded him, and laid an unconscionable amount of ground and pound on him in one of those Japan-likes-to-let-its-heroes-die moments before the ref finally called the fight in just shy of three minutes. Shaydullaev’s the best guy in the company, and now there’s a question of what’s left for him to do. For now, inexplicably, the answer is carry the murder of the 5-2 Yuta Kubo at Rizin Landmark 13 on April 11, which is wild because they already fought at the end of 2024 and Shaydullaev destroyed him in seven and a half minutes.
Rizin Bantamweight Champion, 135 lbs
Danny Sabatello - 17-4-1, 0 Defenses
When Naoki Inoue won Rizin’s Bantamweight title I wrote that Rizin was one step closer to its dream of an all-Japanese championship roster, and it’s fitting that as gaijin once again take over the majority of the championship belts in the biggest organization in Japan, Danny goddamn Sabatello is one of the men to do it. Sabatello has been dogged by a reputation as a grinding wrestler without a ton to offer since 2020, when he got the call to compete on Dana White’s Contender Series, won, and was notably not offered a contract on the grounds of Boring Grappler. He made the move to late-stage Bellator instead, where he attempted to establish himself as their own personal Chael Sonnen: An indefatigable wrestling machine whose mouth ran just as hard as his double-legs. But it never quite caught on. The talk seemed a bit forced, the wrestling wasn’t that fun to watch, and all his 1980s wrestling promos about the bums in Bellator’s Bantamweight Grand Prix ended with an elimination at the hands of Raufeon Stots. Sabatello swore he’d won and that he’d get revenge; instead he ended his Bellator tenure getting choked out by Magomed Magomedov, decisioned again by Stots, and losing out on a shot at the PFL after going to a draw with Lazaro Dayron, who would’ve won the decision were it not for a point deduction. It was a bit of a shock when Sabatello signed with Rizin in 2025, but it seemed to have paid off when he scored his first knockout in six years during his debut against Shinobu Ota and swore he’d reinvent himself as Japan’s new American superstar. Then he went back to wrestling. It was still enough to get him his shot at Inoue’s belt at 2025’s New Year’s special, and despite the common wisdom of judging favoritism, a very close split decision went Danny’s way. It took three years longer than he intended, but Danny Sabatello is holding gold. Now we see if he can, in fact, become Big In Japan. His first title defense will be against Joji Goto at Rizin Landmark 13 on April 11.
Rizin Flyweight Champion, 125 lbs
Hiromasa Ougikubo - 30-8-2, 0 Defenses
It’s been an incredibly long road to gold for Hiromasa Ougikubo. He was a teenager when he made his professional debut all the way back in 2006, and even at 19, he was notable for the tough, gritty way he handled his grappling. Within a year he was a Shooto rookie tournament winner, within a dozen fights he was a regional champion, and a year later, he was Shooto’s Bantamweight World Champion. And then he immediately lost it after getting choked out by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Having faced a level of force he didn’t feel he could contend with, he dropped down to Flyweight, where he was an immediate success, winning the Vale Tudo Japan tournament and, ultimately, the 125-pound Shooto title. That win got him called over to America for the most talent-rich season of The Ultimate Fighter ever, 2016’s Tournament of Champions, where he distinguished himself as one of the best fighters in the house and even beat a young Alexandre Pantoja on his way to the finals. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get past Tim Elliott. He returned to Japan, where, in his absence, Rizin had been reborn in the ashes of Pride FC, and as one of Japan’s best fighters, he got immediately called to the show--where he was immediately defeated by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Ougikubo went back up to Bantamweight and fought his way to a title shot at company star Kai Asakura, but Asakura lanced him with a knee and ended his title hopes again. Undeterred, Hiromasa entered Rizin’s 2021 Bantamweight Grand Prix and stormed the bracket, winning four fights in a year and two in the same night, including the sweet revenge of a championship final where he defeated Asakura and staked his claim as the best Bantamweight in Japan. And then South Korean Kim Soo-chul beat him. So Ougikubo dropped back down to Flyweight for 2022’s massive Bellator vs Rizin supercard--where he was, for the third time, beaten by some guy named Kyoji Horiguchi. Someone should find out if that dude’s any good at fighting. Ougikubo still got his shot at Rizin’s Bantamweight title, but Juan Archuleta beat him, and for the first time in seventeen years of fighting, Ougikubo found himself on a three-fight losing streak. But Horiguchi, Rizin’s Flyweight champion, left the company to return to the UFC, and with the throne empty, Ougikubo wanted one more shot. He went back down to 125 pounds, he entered the 2025 Flyweight Grand Prix, he ran the table one more time, and at the 2025 New Year’s Special he faced and defeated Yuki Motoya to win the tournament and, with it, the vacant belt. It took several tries and almost twenty years, but by god, Hiromasa Ougikubo is the world champion.
Rizin Women’s Super Atomweight Championship, 108 lbs
Seika Izawa - 18-0, 3 Defenses
All hail the new queen. After years of reigning as Japan’s best atomweight, the legendary Ayaka Hamasaki fell not once but twice to the rookie Seika Izawa. A 24 year-old who was pushed into judo as a child by a frustrated mother who was tired of her constant fighting with her brothers, Izawa discovered a love for grappling that led her to win junior championships in judo, wrestling and sumo alike. She would still be pursuing judo had the pandemic not shut down much of its competitive scene, but fortunately, mixed martial arts is a terrible sport run by monsters who don’t care about things like deadly diseases, which made it a tempting professional prospect. Four months after her formal MMA training began Izawa was winning fights in DEEP, less than a year after that she was DEEP’s strawweight champion, and one year later she was dominating one of the best women’s fighters in history on Rizin’s New Year’s Eve special. As Japanese organizations tend to do, frustratingly, the fight was a non-title affair, meaning Izawa had to come back and do it again on April 17. After a scary moment where Hamasaki almost stole an armbar, Izawa resumed her wrestling domination and formally took Rizin’s atomweight championship. As entirely fresh blood, the world of Rizin’s talent is open to her--but that also means she’s got a real, real big target on her back. Rizin’s Superatomweight Grand Prix was both a big coming-out party for Izawa and a series of opportunities to look shockingly mortal: She had a fair bit of trouble with Anastasiya Svetkivska in the semifinals before ultimately submitting her, but her berth in the finals against former rival Si Woo Park proved the toughest fight of her career, ending in a split decision victory she easily could have lost. Seika was supposed to face Miyuu Yamamoto at Rizin 42, but after Yamamoto had to pull out with an injury, Izawa was instead scheduled to face...the last person Yamamoto beat, the 5-3 Suwanan Boonsorn, at DEEP Jewels 41 on July 28. Izawa choked her out, shockingly. It took more than an entire year, but Izawa finally had a title defense against the 8-4 grappler Claire Lopez, and Izawa scored the fastest championship victory in Rizin history, choking her out in just barely one minute. Seika scored one more win on New Year’s Eve, choking out Miyuu Yamamoto in her retirement bout, and while it was an honor, it does sort of emphasize the problem with Seika’s position. She’s unquestionably the best Atomweight in the world, but the last real top fighter she faced was more than a year ago. Will Rizin bring her real competition, or are they trying to simply build a star? And what IS real competition at Atomweight? She choked out Si Yoon Park at DEEP JEWELS 44 to add yet another win and belt to her credit, but the Rizin title wasn’t on the line, so she’s still only got the one defense. She was booked for Rizin 48 on September 29th, and once again instead of a top contender it was Kanna Asakura, and once again, it was a non-title match. Three months later, Rizin booked her for their New Year’s Eve supershow--against Lucia Apdelgarim, a 2-3 kickboxer who’d never beaten an MMA fighter with a single win. Seika submitted her easily and requested international competition, and in their eternal mockery of me, Rizin instead booked her to defend her title against the 3-0 Yu-jin Shin, who fights a weight class and a half up. Shockingly Shin did not make the Atomweight limit, so when Seika beat her easily it was a non-title affair. She had her first actual title defense in two years on November 2, where she beat DEEP’s Saori Oshima, and she shot for a third in very short order, by defending against striking star RENA on the 2025 New Year’s Eve special. It was by far Seika’s toughest fight, with RENA flooring her on a left hook and very nearly knocking her out in the first round, but Seika fought her way back, got RENA down, mauled and ultimately choked her out in the second.
ONE Heavyweight Champion, 265 lbs
Oumar Kane - 7-1, 0 Defenses
The triple championship days are over, and we can go back to appreciating ONE’s Heavyweight division for just how silly it really is. Oumar Kane’s origins are very serious: He grew up near Dakar, the capital of Senegal, and established himself as an undefeated star of Laamb, better known as Senegalese wrestling, a particularly harsh form of the sport that takes place on sand or turf and is fought in tiny shorts. As a giant 6’4” muscle monster with a wrestling background, Kane was an internationally visible talent, and ONE picked him up just one fight into his MMA career and promoted him as an undefeated monster of African wrestling. And it was true! For two fights. In his third bout with ONE, “Reug Reug” lost his undefeated streak in 2021 after gassing just two rounds in against Kirill Grishenko, but the actual ending of the fight was a bizarre sequence involving Grishenko throwing a punch right at the bell that appeared to graze Kane’s chin, only for Oumar to motion that he had been illegally punched in the throat after the bell and collapse onto the mat. After replays showed the punch barely connecting, the fight was ruled a TKO, and Oumar was accused of pulling a soccer dive. He spent three years building a three-fight winning streak--including a kickboxing match with “Boucher Ketchup” Mamadou Kamara, who is not a fighter but an influencer, and who fought exactly the way that sounds--and eventually that led him to a November 9, 2024 showdown with triple champ Anatoly Malykhin. The resulting fight was, to be gentle, pretty dreadful. Malykhin didn’t know how to get in on Kane, Kane repeatedly backed himself into a corner to focus on countering, and outside of the first round and a bit of the fifth, very little actually happened. But a takedown in the first round, a yellow card on Malykhin’s part for grabbing the ropes and a flash knockdown in the fifth were enough for Kane to win the title by split decision. “Reug Reug” is the champion. ONE was trying to position Marcus “Buchecha” Almeida as the top contender, but given that Kane beat him to get his title shot in the first place--and, uh, Buchecha left the company after the fight--and they don’t have any other fucking Heavyweights except, like, Kirill Grishenko--unsurprisingly, ONE decided to just book a rematch an entire year later. Kane vs Malykhin 2 was scheduled for ONE 173 on November 16, 2025, but Reug Reug managed to get concussed in a car accident and the fight had to be postponed until an indefinite future date.
ONE Light Heavyweight Champion, 225 lbs
Anatoly Malykhin - 14-1, 0 Defenses
ONE Middleweight Champion, 205 lbs
Anatoly Malykhin - 14-1, 0 Defenses
For the second time in as many title reigns, ONE has managed to put a ton of hype behind a champion only to squash them prematurely. Anatoly Malykhin is one of the most successful marketing campaigns ONE ever ran: An undefeated, heavy-punching Russian Heavyweight with a 100% finishing rate. He knocked out everyone he faced, he carried ONE’s Heavyweight division as an interim champion while standing champion Arjan Bhullar was having contract issues, and when Bhullar finally re-entered the fold, Malykhin destroyed him with ease. But ONE had greater hopes for Malykhin as their spearhead for real international notoriety: They would make him the first three-division champion in the history of mixed martial arts. And it’d be real easy, because the other two belts were held by one guy. Reinier de Ridder had been their superstar double-champion, but his relationship with ONE had soured, and they cashed in by having de Ridder face Malykhin, twice, at both his weight classes. Malykhin destroyed him and became the first-ever 265, 225 and 205-pound champion the sport has ever seen--admittedly easier when you consider 225 is not a division that exists in almost any other federation on Earth. But he did it! And then they organized his first-ever title defense by having him put the Heavyweight belt on the line against Oumar “Reug Reug” Kane, and he lost a split decision, and now he is a lowly two-belt schmuck. It’ll be interesting to see what they do with Malykhin now, given that the last 205-pound fight ONE promoted was Malykhin’s bout against de Ridder, and the last 225-pound fight ONE promoted was Malykhin’s 2022 bout with de Ridder. He was hoping to get the Heavyweight title back at ONE 173, but with Reug Reug injured, Malykhin’s playing the waiting game.
ONE Welterweight Champion, 185 lbs
Christian Lee - 18-4 (1), 0 Defenses
ONE Lightweight Champion, 170 lbs
Christian Lee - 18-4 (1), 1 Defense
It took three tries, but by god, Chatri gets what Chatri wants. Christian Lee, the male half of the first family of ONE Championship and its homegrown golden boy, was very mad about losing his lightweight championship in a controversial decision to Ok Rae Yoon last year. He demanded the decision be reviewed and overturned and his championship reinstated. Unsurprisingly: This did not happen. After months of complaining and just shy of a year of waiting, the two had their long-awaited rematch and Lee left nothing to chance, knocking Yoon out in six minutes to reclaim his belt. Having finally retrieved his title, Lee, being a responsible champion, proceeded to immediately challenge ONE’S 185-pound champion, Kiamrian Abbasov, for his title, a move that was definitely in no way influenced by ONE’s repeated attempts to get his sister Angela Lee double-champion status. Fortunately for Christian, Abbasov horribly botched his weight cut: He came in overweight, lost his title on the scale, and was visibly depleted in the fight. Which is particularly lucky, because Abbasov beat Lee senseless in the first round to the point that a standing TKO would not have been an unreasonable stoppage. But whether from his failed weight cut or simply from punching himself out, Abbasov was exhausted by the second round, and Lee mounted a gutsy comeback and ultimately stopped him with ground-and-pound in the fourth round. After three attempts, ONE has succeeded in getting two belts on a Lee. Unfortunately, it was followed by tragedy. After the passing of his younger sister Victoria, Christian took the whole of the year to, understandably, grieve. ONE planned his comeback for February of 2024, but, y’know, that clearly did not happen. ONE held an interim title fight between Alibeg Rasulov and Ok Rae Yoon to welcome him back--but that didn’t exactly happen either, as Rasulov failed hydration tests, became ineligible to win the title, then won the fight anyway. Lee vs Rasulov was scheduled for October. And then November. It finally happened on December 7, 2024--and it ended in a No Contest after two rounds thanks to Christian unintentionally gouging Rasulov’s eye. They ran it back almost a full year later at ONE 173 on November 16, and this time Lee knocked him out in the second round, marking Lee’s first win in three years.
ONE Featherweight Champion, 155 lbs
Tang Kai - 19-4, 1 Defense
Tang Kai has been flying under the radar for some time, and in hindsight, that was clearly a mistake. He made his professional debut as a 20 year-old collegiate wrestler and won a rookie featherweight tournament in China’s WBK (after investigating, we THINK it’s World Battle Kings), but his stylistic limitations became apparent when he moved up to Kunlun Fight--and stopped fighting rookies. Dominant decision losses to ACA standout Bekhruz “Ong Bak” Zukurov and Road to UFC runner-up Asikeerbai Jinensibieke made Kai’s weaknesses too apparent to ignore, and he made the tough call to commit to his dream, pack up his life, and move away from home to start training with real fight camps, most notably Shanghai’s Dragon Gym and Phuket’s legendary Tiger Muay Thai. It’s worked out quite well: He hasn’t lost a fight in five years. Three knockout wins in China’s Rebel FC got ONE’s attention, and since debuting with the organization in 2019, Kai has soundly defeated everyone in his path. He claims his wrestling base makes him impossible to take down and he proves it by using it almost entirely defensively, vastly preferring to bludgeon his opponents on his feet. His fight against Thanh Le, while blistering and difficult, was proof: He evaded every takedown attempt, widely outstruck him, dropped him with punches and leg kicks alike, and took the belt he’s held for two years. And then, absolutely nothing else happened. It took ONE almost a full year to book another match for Tang Kai, and it was just an instant rematch with Thanh Le with no fanfare, and it was delayed by eight full months thanks to an injury. So after more than a year and a half without a fight, Tang Kai finally fought Thanh Le again, and this time, he knocked him out in three rounds. Congratulations, Tang Kai: You are back at square one. His position hasn’t improved much, either. He was supposed to defend his title against Akbar Abdullaev on January 10, and Abdullaev pounded him out in the fifth round, but he also missed weight by a pound and a half and thus was ineligible for the championship. So, hey: Still a world champion! You just got knocked out a little bit. It’s fine.
ONE Bantamweight Champion, 145 lbs
Engh-Orgil Baatarkhuu - 14-3, 0 Defenses
By god, ONE had an MMA title change hands in 2025. Enkh-Orgil Baatarkhuu is one of the precious few success stories for ONE’s feeder system. He was a 5-2 champion in the small (but competitive!) regional scene in his native Mongolia, which put him on ONE’s talent-scouting radar for their Warriors of the Steppe tournament in 2022. Enkh won two fights in six days to earn his contract with ONE, where he quickly discovered that no matter where you go in the wide world of sports, being a grappler-type Pokemon makes companies less invested in promoting you. Enkh went 6-1 across two years--8-1, if you count those aforementioned tournament wins--and finished most of his opponents, but title contention eluded him in no small part thanks to ONE’s turn away from mixed martial arts as a whole. It wasn’t until December 6 that Enkh finally got his long-belated shot at Fabricio Andrade’s Bantamweight title, and the first round and a half looked pretty thoroughly one-sided in Andrade’s favor, as most had figured it would be given the gap in Enkh’s striking game, and Andrade battered him to a near-stoppage on a couple occasions. But Enkh, as it turns out, is tough as shit. He weathered the storm and used his grit, his power and his wrestling to turn the tables, and towards the end of the fourth round, an exhausted Andrade gave up the ghost and got himself strangled. Enkh-Orgil Baatarkhuu is ONE’s Bantamweight champion, and his very first act as a champion was to call for a cross-class title match with Tang Kai, because weight classes aren’t real.
ONE Flyweight Champion, 135 lbs
Yuya Wakamatsu - 20-6, 1 Defense
After two years of solitude, ONE’s Flyweight title has a home again, and it is to one of the men most denied it. Yuya Wakamatsu was a Pancrase standout in Japan for years before the rest of the world knew his name, but even there, he couldn’t get over the hump, winning their Flyweight Neo-Blood Tournament in 2016 only to get knocked out by standing champion Senzo Ikeda when he challenged for the title itself. But ONE’s aggressive expansion in the late 2010s brought in a lot of Japanese talent, including both Wakamatsu and Ikeda, and fittingly, both lost their first two fights and were promptly forgotten by most of the audience. But where his nemesis retired in fairly short order, Wakamatsu kept grinding and ultimately built up a five-fight winning streak, which was more than enough to justify a shot at then-champion Adriano Moraes--which he lost. And then he missed weight and got knocked out. And then he won, but missed weight again. ONE was decidedly unhappy with him, but he got his weight cut under control and returned to his winning ways, and when Demetrious Johnson retired and abdicated the belt, ONE needed an answer. On March 23, 2025, Wakamatsu and Moraes had a rematch three years in the making, and this time, Wakamatsu made it count by pounding Moraes out in a single round. After a decade in the sport and three at-bats, Yuya Wakamatsu finally has his championship belt. His first defense was a champion vs champion match against Joshua Pacio at ONE 173 on November 16, because ONE needs to fire their bullets as soon as they have them. Yuya punched him out in six minutes.
ONE Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs
Joshua Pacio - 23-5, 1 Defense
It’s been a difficult couple of years for Joshua Pacio. “The Passion” stands as a true veteran of ONE Championship, having made his debut--and his first, unsuccessful attempt at winning the Strawweight title--all the way back in 2016. Pacio established himself as both a fan favorite and a solid promotional favorite for the company, and when he lost his second bid for the title against Yosuke Saruta in 2019, ONE, in a trick they’d become very friendly with over the years, gave him an instant rematch anyway. Pacio knocked Saruta out in the rematch and became easily the greatest 125-pound champion in ONE history, ultimately defending the title three times--including a trilogy match against Saruta. By 2022, Pacio was a crown jewel for ONE’s lineup. Which is when he promptly got wrestled into paste by UFC cast-off Jarred Brooks. Rather than having him defend the title, ONE booked Brooks into grappling matches, and in the meantime Pacio fought and defeated undefeated prospect Mansur Malachiev to earn himself a rematch. Multiple delays ensued, but on March 1, the Brooks/Pacio rematch finally came. Fifty-six seconds in, Pacio attempted a standing kimura on Brooks, who hoisted him off the ground, suplexed him, and knocked him out. Unfortunately, this was a problem. Under ONE’s ruleset, slams that land headfirst are illegal. ONE has been regularly criticized for this--less for the rule itself as for ONE’s tendency to selectively enforce the rule, using it to benefit fighters they would like to succeed. ONE, of course, denies this vehemently. However you draw your own conclusions, at the end of the day Jarred Brooks was disqualified, and thus, by DQ, Joshua Pacio is now a three-time Strawweight champion. He almost immediately announced he has torn his ACL and was out for an entire year. On February 20th, 2025, Pacio and Brooks finally fought again and it was weird, but definitive. Jarred Brooks seemingly exhausted himself after a round and Pacio pounded him for the entire second round, which eventually elicited a mercy stoppage from the ref. ONE has only one 125-pound champion again. So he, of course, challenged for the 135-pound title next. Pacio vs Wakamatsu happened at ONE 173 on November 16 and ended in Pacio getting smashed in six minutes.
ONE Women’s Strawweight Champion, 125 lbs
Xiong Jing Nan - 19-2, 7 Defenses
Xiong Jing Nan dreamed of lifting weights. She’d enjoyed sports as a child, and when China started its national push for Olympic supremacy she began training heavily in hope of joining the national weightlifting team. But then she met aspirants for its boxing team and fell in love with the idea of living out a martial arts movie and getting to hit people for fun and profit and she never looked back. She turned pro in 2014 and immediately became a standout, going 9-1 in China’s Kunlun Fight promotion with wins across three separate weight classes. What made her truly dangerous wasn’t one-punch power, but the ability to break her opponents with constant pressure striking, scoring TKOs with combinations stretched out across dozens of consecutive, unending strikes. The story was no different when she moved to ONE in 2017, and she was strawweight champion within two fights. ONE’s women’s MMA divisions have been its most stable, each having had exactly one champion, and they were so dominant that they inevitably had to fight each other--and, hilariously, traded wins back and forth in the process. 115 lbs champion Angela Lee went up to 125 to challenge for Xiong Jing Nan’s belt but Nan stopped her with body kicks in the fifth round, and half a year later Nan dropped down to 115 to challenge for Lee’s belt only for Lee to choke her out with twelve seconds left in the fight. Xiong has notched three successful title defenses since, which set her up for her greatest challenger yet: Angela Lee, again, apparently. Despite ONE’s best attempts, Xiong successfully defended her title against Lee again, nearly finishing her in the first round and ultimately winning a decision. An entire 364 days later, she had her next fight: A special rules match, with MMA gloves but only punches and no takedowns or clinching allowed, against Muay Thai champion Nat “Wondergirl” Jaroonsak. Half a year later her next fight was finally announced, and it was, once, defending her title against ONE’s new postergirl in Stamp Fairtex as the company attempts, once again, to make a double champ at Xiong Jing Nan’s expense, and with Stamp out injured ONE went back to radio silence. It took half a year for Xiong to get rebooked--and it was a non-title fight against Bo Meng at 115 pounds. Xiong won, and once again, what the hell are we doing.
ONE Women’s Atomweight Champion, 115 lbs
Denice Zamboanga - 12-2, 0 Defenses
Denice Zamboanga, to be clear, is not the problem with ONE’s women’s divisions. She’s a good fighter. She’s been trucking along in ONE since 2009, she’s proven herself repeatedly as a solid all-around competitor. She’s tough, she’s talented, she’s never been finished. She’s also never beaten a top fighter. She’s fought 0-0 rookies, she’s beaten journeywomen on losing streaks--in a dozen fights with ONE, she’s only beaten someone coming off a victory at all twice. She was also notably defeated by Seo Hee Ham, the top Atomweight contender and former Rizin champion, twice in a row. It was consequently a bit of a surprise to Ham when ONE announced an interim title fight to make up for Stamp’s injury absence and she wasn’t in it. Instead of her, the #1 contender whose only loss in ONE was to Stamp herself, it would be Denice Zamboanga, the woman she beat, against Alyona Rassohyna, a woman she also beat and who, as a bonus, had not fought in ONE since September of 2021--when she lost to Stamp Fairtex. This was all supposed to end in a unification match with Stamp at ONE 173 on August 1, but in early May, ONE announced that Stamp had reinjured her knee and was going to miss at least the rest of 2025. With the awareness that it would have been close to two and a half years between title fights, Stamp ‘voluntarily relinquished’ her title. This wound up being even more infuriating when ONE failed to rebook Denice for so long that upon finally scheduling her again, they chose ONE 173 on November 16, where Stamp Fairtex, who is now healthy, will be fighting a completely unrelated kickboxing match. Denice will face Ayaka Miura. Rather: Denice was going to face Ayaka Miura, but at the end of August she announced medical issues will prevent her from fighting. So they made an interim title fight for Stamp’s return against a non-#1 contender, and then they stripped Stamp for being unable to compete, and then they didn’t schedule the next championship fight until the card where Stamp was making her return anyway, and now Stamp is healthy and fighting but the Atomweight champion isn’t. Stamp lost and Denice has yet to be rebooked. Just fucking stop already.
Invicta Bantamweight Championship, 135 lbs
Jennifer Maia - 23-10-1, 0 Defenses
It did not take Jennifer Maia long to find her way back home to Invicta after the UFC cut her in 2023, and it only took a year for her to reclaim gold in the company she left behind. This is, in fact, Maia’s third stint with Invicta: The first time around was back in 2013, when Invicta was barely a year old and Maia was only a couple years and nine fights into her career, and it saw Maia distinguishing herself as a hot prospect but failing to get past the top ranks. She came back in 2016 as a more seasoned fighter and captured its Flyweight championship, but, as is the fate of all regional champions, she traded the belt for a ticket to the UFC. Her half-decade in the big show was by no means bad--she even fought Valentina Shevchenko for the UFC’s 125-pound title--but she still couldn’t crack the top of the mountain, and eventually, the UFC got tired of her derailing prospects and let her go. It only took two fights for Maia to dethrone Talita Bernardo and gain her second Invicta gold. Hopefully she sticks around this time.
Invicta Atomweight Championship, 105 lbs
Elisandra Ferreira - 9-2, 1 Defense
The only major Atomweight division in America is back, and as happens so often, it belongs to Brazil. Elisandra “Lili” Ferreira started competing as an amateur at 19, lost all of her amateur fights, and proceeded to turn pro anyway, because giving up sucks. She spent the first third of her professional career fighting at Strawweight simply because Atomweight opportunities are few and farbetween, but she made the turn to the lower weight class in 2021 and never looked back, and boy, it’s worked out for her. With one exception--a loss to Anastasia Nikolakakos, maybe the best Atomweight on this side of the globe--Ferreira’s cleaned house on the division. She made the jump to Invicta in 2023, and a year and a half later she’s 4-0 and the new bannerwoman for its most unique weight class, thanks to a hard-fought decision over Andressa Romero on September 20, 2024. Invicta’s 2024 comeback has reclaimed its first lost title; now we just have to see who they line up to test Ferreira over the next year of its renaissance. Her first at-bat came against Ana Palacios at Invicta FC 61 on April 4, and Ferreira earned a near-shutout on the scorecards.
PFL Heavyweight Championship, 265 lbs
Vadim Nemkov - 19-2 (1), 0 Defenses
When the PFL announced that it was going to crown a standing Heavyweight champion, they had a raft of interesting options. Oleg Popov, their 2025 tournament champion, had a strong argument. Denis Goltsov, 2024 champion and the only man in almost ten years to beat Popov, could’ve called dibs. Hell, the PFL still technically has Francis Ngannou, the best Heavyweight on the planet, under contract. They, of course, did not choose any of those men. They chose Renan Ferreira, the 2023 tournament champion whose only fight in almost two years was a TKO loss to Ngannou, and Vadim Nemkov, Bellator’s best Light Heavyweight. Nemkov, a Fedor protégé, hadn’t lost since 2016, when he got himself punched out by Jiří Procházka and narrowly edged out by Karl Albrektsson, and it’s a testament to both his skills and the world’s dim view of the Heavyweight division that when the PFL acquired Bellator and Nemkov announced he was leaving 205 for the 265-pound world, instead of the expected fretting about how a 6’1” man would contend in the world of the big boys, more or less everyone said “Yeah, that’s fine.” And lo: It was. Nemkov choked out 2021 PFL champ Bruno Cappelozza, and then he choked out the ever-pained Timothy Johnson, and when he fought Renan Ferreira at PFL Champions Series 4 on December 13, 2025, shockingly, he choked him out, too. Nemkov’s now the only major Heavyweight champion in American MMA outside of the UFC. Hopefully it pays off.
PFL Light Heavyweight Championship, 205 lbs
Corey Anderson - 20-6 (1), 0 Defenses
One of the best Light Heavyweights in the world isn’t in the UFC, and they have only themselves to blame. Corey Anderson was the precise kind of fighter the UFC wanted when they first got ahold of him in 2014: Big, young, athletic, talented, undefeated. He had all the makings of a future champion, and his victory on The Ultimate Fighter 19 (jesus christ) cemented him as a prospect to watch. Unfortunately, he had also barely been in the sport for a year and only had four professional fights to his name. In short order he’d suffered his first loss, and a couple years later, a pair of back-to-back knockouts in 2017 sent him to the realm of afterthoughts. But a recommitment to his wrestling style, an extremely well-aged victory over Glover Teixeira, and a devastating knockout over Johnny Walker got Anderson back in the title picture, and in 2020, he fought Jan Błachowicz to determine the #1 contender to the soon-to-be-vacated belt. They’d done battle once, five years prior, and Corey had won a clear decision. This time, Jan flattened him in three minutes. Despite his top-ten ranking and the four consecutive fights he’d just won, the UFC decided to dump Corey, sending him from main event to unemployment in a week. Corey went straight to Bellator and proceeded to become one of its best stars, and he would have become the first man in America to beat Vadim Nemkov had they not banged their heads together and ended the fight prematurely. Corey lost the rematch, but he became the last man to hold Bellator’s Light Heavyweight title after beating Karl Moore, and on October 3, Corey had a champion vs champion match against the PFL’s 205-pound tournament champion, Dovletdzhan Yagshimuradov. Corey had pounded him out in Bellator four years prior, and while he didn’t get the stoppage in the present, he did get the win, and in so doing he became the inaugural PFL Light Heavyweight Champion. What that actually means going forward, we’ll have to see.
PFL Middleweight Championship, 185 lbs
Costello van Steenis - 17-3, 0 Defenses
For years, the Professional Fighters League has threatened to crown standing champions. Did they carry through any of their major tournament winners? Nope. Did they bring out their holdout Bellator champions? Not exactly! Did they at least make a big hubbub about finally going through with it? Of course not. Instead, just five days before PFL Champions Series 2, their promotional debut in South Africa, they abruptly announced that Bellator champ Johnny Eblen was suddenly the first-ever PFL Middleweight Champion, and his match with Costello van Steenis was the first-ever defense of the title. Costello, himself, was a Bellator veteran who’d been absorbed in the PFL buyout, but he’d always played second fiddle in the organization, unable to get through the John Salters and Douglas Limas of the world, and thus said world was mostly overlooking him as a challenger. The first three rounds of Eblen gradually grinding him into dust bore out that expectation, but then a funny thing happened: The inexhaustible wrestler got tired. Eblen found himself punched up by van Steenis in the fourth round, and he seemed to be pulling it together again in the fifth, but right before the bell could ring van Steenis managed to take his back and sink in a choke, and with just seven seconds separating him from an almost-certain decision victory, Eblen passed out. Costello van Steenis is the first man to truly hold a standing PFL Championship, and he’ll be defending his title in a rematch with Fabian Edwards on March 7.
PFL Lightweight Championship, 155 lbs
Usman Nurmagomedov - 21-0 (1), 1 Defense
The Nurmagomedov family is trying to run the sport, and Usman is their B-league beachhead, but that assault has proven to be an awful lot rockier than the rest. As the kid brother of Umar and the cousin of Khabib, Usman had great expectations thrust upon him very early in his career, and he dealt with them the way regional talents with great camps traditionally do: Squashing severely overmatched competition until you get a contract from one of the big companies. Bellator won the Usman bidding war and brought him over in 2021, and he proved to be one of the breakout stars of their final days, blitzing his way up the Lightweight ranks, knocking off several contenders and ultimately beating Patricky Pitbull to win the 155-pound championship and securing his reign by retiring former star and UFC champ Benson Henderson. It was 2023, and even though Bellator’s upcoming death was clear, Usman was a name and widely considered one of the best Lightweights in the world. Unfortunately, then, things got weird. He was a massive, -2200 favorite to beat Brent Primus in the waning days of Bellator, and he did--and it became the first non-win of his career after failing a drug test for something that was never disclosed. He carried Bellator’s title over into its new life as a colony of the PFL, and he immediately ran into controversy after barely scraping a majority decision off of Irish superprospect Paul Hughes. The world wanted a rematch for the inaugural PFL Lightweight Championship fight, and on October 3, at the PFL’s big Dubai show, they got it--and this time, it waws even closer, with media scorecards split right down the middle. This, by itself, is not that unusual, nor is one fighter winning a controversial decision unusual. It is unusual when the decision is not only unanimous, but one judge scores the entire fight as a 50-45 shut-out. So Usman’s last two wins were dubious, and his future as part of the PFL depends on how they treat their own championship, but for now, he is the damn champion. He notched his first title defense by choking out Alfie Davis on February 7.
PFL Women’s Featherweight Champion, 145 lbs
Cris Cyborg - 29-2 (1), 1 Defense
Are you noticing how all of the inaugural PFL champions are just Bellator’s champions? Funny, that. Cris Cyborg is the greatest Women’s Featherweight of all time, and we all just kind of have to deal with that, because Women’s Featherweight has only barely ever existed. Strikeforce set the standard back in 2006 because Gina Carano was one of their biggest stars, and that star lasted right up until 2009, when they attempted to put a belt on her and failed because Cris Cyborg punched the shit out of her. In the following sixteen years Cyborg’s only lost one mixed martial arts fight, and it took Amanda Nunes, the greatest Women’s mixed martial artist of all time, to do it. Aside from that one loss, she’s run the table. She was the Strikeforce Featherweight Champion until it closed, and then she was Invicta’s Featherweight Champion until they let the UFC have her, and then she was the UFC’s Featherweight Champion until Amanda dropped her, and Cyborg promptly went to Bellator and won their title, too. When the PFL brought her over in the Bellator buyout, they set her up for an interpromotional superfight against Larissa Pacheco, a two-time PFL tournament winner and the only woman who’d ever beaten Kayla Harrison. On one hand, Pacheco’s one of just six women to ever make it to the final bell with Cyborg. On the other, she lost 4-1. In the ultimate act of promotional cowardice, the PFL promoted Cyborg to champion status three days before her appearance at the PFL Champions Series on December 13, 2025, meaning her fight with Sara Collins was, technically, a title defense. It was as one-sided as you’d expect. In theory, this is great! The biggest female fighter outside the UFC has a belt and the PFL is bringing back a division the UFC threw in the garbage. In practice, Cyborg didn’t even get out of her post-fight interview without noting that after her next fight she’s going to retire from MMA in favor of focusing on her boxing career. So welcome back, Women’s Featherweight. I hope you still exist by 2027.