With the UFC 300 pay-per-view acting more as a mood ring for people and their high expectations, the penultimate benchmark card—UFC 299—is acting like the middle finger on the very same hand, hogging up all the attention. Saturday night’s card in Miami is so good that fight fans are confused. For the last few weeks, battles have been waged all over social media regarding which card is bigger. Which one is deeper. Which one has more bang for the buck.
The answer comes down to a matter of taste, of course, but one thing is certain—there won’t be a bigger weekend in combat sports than this weekend. Taken as a whole, this is the kind of weekend that can turn even the most squeamish stomachs into connoisseurs of the concussive blow, and diehards into putty.
On Thursday night, the French hero Cédric Doumbé headlines the PFL’s return to Paris. That fight would be a bigger deal on an ordinary weekend, given that Doumbé put on one of the most electric shows of 2023, knocking out Jordan Zébo in the blink of an eye. Actually, it was in just nine seconds, yet in that time, he became not only a national icon in France (where MMA was illegal until 2020), but also one of the PFL’s most bankable stars.
On Friday night in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, boxing’s greatest interloper—Francis Ngannou—will take on Olympic gold medalist Anthony Joshua in his domain: the boxing ring. If you had read that sentence a year ago, it wouldn’t have made a lick of sense, but in March 2024, those are the facts. What’s more astonishing still is that we accept them as something other than an outright bamboozlement. After (somewhat impossibly) knocking Tyson Fury down in his first pro boxing bout back in October, and losing but narrowly on the scorecards, Ngannou has done what no crossover MMA-to-the-ring fighter has done on a lark before: He has forced boxing purists to take him seriously.
The headliner for the weekend is UFC 299. Examine that card closely, and you’ll mumble things to yourself like, “huh … holy shit … wait, Gamrot is on the pre … no fucking way …” It’s a stacked card. It has something for everyone, even the cynical hardcores who’ve seen it all. If you like tornado kicks and tributes to Naruto, there’s Michael “Venom” Page making his long-awaited UFC debut. If you like capoeira flips, there’s Michel Pereira, a showman at his core. If you like glowing neon pink champions that look like something you’d win at a 1980s arcade, you’ll love “Suga” Sean O’Malley—one of the biggest stars on the UFC roster.
In some ways, this weekend’s fights are the result of an ongoing evolution within combat sports. On Friday night, you have a former UFC champion who has found that the grass truly is greener on the other side, tempting every underpaid, underappreciated MMA fighter to put back on some shoes and heavier gloves. Ngannou is combat’s Trojan Horse for crossover riches.
On Saturday night, you have a flamboyant social media master who has tattoos on his face and is a fan of, ahem, herbal remedies. The kids love O’Malley, the podcaster-slash-fighter, and adults who follow the game are drawn to pretty colors. Some say O’Malley has the “it” factor, and not for those reasons alone. The primary reason that O’Malley is the guy is that he’s a rangy striker on his feet who kicks the hell out of people, often making it look too easy. That he’s wearing the UFC bantamweight belt is almost too good to be true for the UFC marketing department.
Ngannou, O’Malley, and the endless riches of Riyadh, oh my! This isn’t your father’s combat world.
Here are a few key things to watch this weekend, beginning with Thursday in Paris.
Is Paris the hotbed for Cédric Doumbé that Dublin was for Conor McGregor?
I saw that Doumbé was being sponsored by a new pharmaceutical drug called Chamsoudinov, and was happy that his success was yielding a few extra bucks. Upon further review, it turns out that’s the name of his opponent on Thursday night, Baysangur Chamsoudinov, who locals in Paris know as “Baki.” He trains at the same MMA Factory in the City of Light that produced Ciryl Gane.
Regardless of who it is, the PFL is essentially tossing raw chicken into the gator’s waiting maw. Doumbé was one of the big stories of 2023. A kickboxing champion who had crossed over to MMA, he had a fight with Darian Weeks lined up in the UFC in 2022, yet was too inexperienced to get sanctioned by the snooty French commission. (Doumbé says that it was a medical issue that stopped his debut before it even began.) Ultimately, he was released from his UFC contract and landed in the PFL.
Granted, he’s only 5-0 as a pro mixed martial artist, but what a godsend Doumbé is. In the summer of 2016, when Zuffa sold the UFC to Endeavor, it had shining stars like Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor to help nudge the billions a few notches north. Last November, when the PFL purchased Bellator, Doumbé was one of the reasons to expand. Creating stars in MMA has been a UFC business. To have an organic star in its midst is precisely what the PFL needs, and to have him establish cult status in his native country is a good start.
It’s a little reminiscent of McGregor’s moment in Dublin in 2014 when he took out Diego Brandão at the 3Arena to kick off a decade-long celebration of all things Irish.
(In case your fight schedule isn’t totally full, the U.K.-based GLORY kickboxing promotion—which formerly housed Doumbé, Alex Pereria, Israel Adesanya, Alistair Overeem, and other MMA stars—has its own big show this weekend. Saturday’s GLORY Grand Prix in the Netherlands features an eight-man heavyweight tournament headlined by champion Rico Verhoeven, who hasn’t lost a fight since 2015.)
Francis Ngannou’s big adventure continues.
When Ngannou fought heavyweight champion Tyson Fury back in October, in one of the unlikeliest of boxing debuts on record, we could all agree on a few things.
To start, regardless of the result, Ngannou had already won. He had stood his ground against the skinflints at the UFC, received his release, and then—just as his haters were hollering that he’d “fumbled the bag” by betting on himself—secured the biggest payday of his life in the Fury fight.
We could agree that Saudi Arabia had the kind of deep pockets that would pry the boxing world’s imagination open. All things seemed possible if His Excellency Turki Alalshikh could bring Fury and Ngannou together. And not just in boxing, but also in MMA. Both the PFL and the UFC are already dipping their hands into those deep Saudi pockets. If any entity might be able to one day make Jon Jones versus Ngannou—the fight everyone wanted before Ngannou split up with the UFC—Saudi Arabia could. (Jones even attended the PFL’s first Saudi event a couple of weeks back, just to tantalize us.)
Against Fury, we could almost certainly, unanimously agree that Ngannou would get his ass kicked. What the hell was he doing? Fury was undefeated in 33 professional fights, while Ngannou was winless in zero professional fights. He was about to get schooled in the most humbling way, continuing the embarrassing tradition that McGregor started by sacrificing his chin to Floyd Mayweather Jr. in 2017.
So, what happened? Ngannou not only stood toe-to-toe with Fury, but he knocked him down in the third round. That was the snapshot of the year. The rest of the fight was Fury trying to solve an unmoving, coiled-up Cameroonian tank while also pinching himself as if to say that what was happening was, in fact, real. Fury won on the scorecards, but Ngannou had entered the world of boxing with a bang.
That meant another big fight in the boxing ring—this time against former unified heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua, who has been vying for a shot at Fury. What’s at stake on Friday night? Plenty. If Joshua wins, he would be in line for a Fury fight (presuming Fury beats Oleksandr Usyk in May). If Ngannou wins, he gets that super-lucrative rematch with Fury, and becomes one of the biggest names in the combat sports game.
If Ngannou loses? That’s the tricky thing. So long as he has a good showing, here’s guessing a fight with Deontay Wilder in the boxing ring still holds some intrigue. But if he gets humiliated, a return to MMA and his obligation with the PFL is almost certainly the next move. The PFL has an opponent ready for him in Renan Ferreira, which, after playing around with names like Fury and Joshua, puts a few extra z’s in buzzzzkill.
Changing of the guard at UFC 299?
At UFC 298 last month, there was a premonition in the air. It was that the greatest featherweight in UFC history, Alexander Volkanovski, was 35 years old and coming off a knockout loss to Islam Makhachev; two facts that looked like red flags. Yet what ultimately spelled D-O-O-M was that he was going against a cold-blooded, 27-year-old phenom named Ilia Topuria, who was on the verge of turning his home country of Spain into a hotbed for MMA.
We saw what happened. Topuria knocked Volkanovski out in the second round and was featured on the cover of the popular Spanish magazine MARCA within a week. In retrospect, his victory lap felt inevitable.
Such moments of truth aren’t altogether uncommon in MMA, yet to get a bunch of “changing of the guard” fights so clustered together might be. Heading into UFC 299, the cold fingers of time are reaching for Dustin Poirier and Gilbert Burns.
On paper, the 37-year-old Burns fighting Jack Della Maddalena is a banger. The Australian Della Maddalena has won 16 straight fights dating back to 2016, and he obliterated everyone thrown in front of him when he got to the UFC, with four consecutive finishes. Of late he’s had to work for it, scoring back-to-back decisions, but the UFC is high on his prospects. And ultimately, getting by a venerated welterweight fixture like Burns pole vaults him into that title picture. UFC matchmakers are well aware of the dynamic, and this is how they refresh a division—by siccing a hungry young fighter on a mainstay.
Something about Della Maddalena creeping into this position feels dangerous and undersung. He’s approaching Burns with a side-eyed ascent.
The same thing goes for France’s 28-year-old Benoit Saint Denis, a smashing machine of the highest order, who just happens to be seven years younger than the well-respected icon Poirier. It is true that Poirier is a gunslinger who knows how to exploit weaknesses and break a man’s will, but Saint Denis is like the blood-dimmed tide rolling in. Each of his five victories in the UFC have been finishes, and he is the man nobody wants to face.
Perhaps that’s what appeals to Poirier: to take out the surging force everyone is raving about like an OG while at the same time reminding everyone that he is still Him. Their match could be a war of epic proportions, as Poirier—who is entering his 30th UFC fight and has been with the promotion for 13 years—has more dog in him than anyone else in the UFC.
These kinds of fights are always great because the head says, “nobody fucks with Poirier,” while the gut says, “find your safe place, Dustin, it’ll all be over soon.”
How deep is UFC 299? Very.
And the reason to argue that UFC 299 is superior to UFC 300—which features two championship fights and a BMF title defense by Justin Gaethje—can be found in the details.
The swing bout on the main card features a clash between Kevin Holland and Michael “Venom” Page, an otherworldly striker that people have dubbed the English Anderson Silva. The great thing about this fight is that Holland, one of the most renowned in-fight talkers who is long and loves to stand and trade, will accommodate Page. Why play right into Page’s wheelhouse? Because Holland is less concerned with rankings and title shots as he is building a career highlight reel that will stand the test of time.
Meanwhile, Page put a dent in Evangelista Santos’s head during a Bellator fight back in 2016, which is an unshakable image to this day. He has scored some of the most ridiculous knockouts over the years, and the only thing left for him to do is test himself against UFC fighters. They don’t come much better than Holland.
Also:
- The winner of the heavyweight bout between Curtis Blaydes and upstart Jailton Almeida is very likely to face interim heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall next. This fight is the featured prelim in Miami, meaning the fight that directly precedes the PPV portion. Given those stakes and the matchup itself, this fight could’ve headlined any UFC Fight Night this year.
- Mateusz Gamrot’s fight against the ever-durable Rafael Dos Anjos is also buried in the prelims. Look at Gamrot’s last three victories: He beat Arman Tsarukyan, Jalin Turner, and Rafael Fiziev. Every single one of those names is expected to have a say in the title picture at some point. Yet Gamrot, with his submission skills, cardio, and dogged will, is poised to very quietly arrive there first.
- Oh yeah, the once-mighty juggernaut and former champion Petr Yan kicks off the main card against Song Yadong, one of the young guns of the bantamweight division. Nobody’s talking about it because it’s buried beneath 10 megatons of marquee fights.
The “Suga” Show Era looks like nothing we’ve ever seen.
The UFC loves itself some Sean O’Malley. They circled him as a potential star when he was on Dana White’s Contender Series. Not long thereafter, he was sparking up doobs with Snoop Dogg and generally ruffling feathers in the bantamweight division.
We’ve seen a little bit of everything from O’Malley. We’ve seen him do his post-fight interview with Joe Rogan while lying on his back in pain after beating Andre Soukhamthath. We’ve seen him essentially finish Thomas Almeida twice in the same fight and land about two million strikes on the tough Kris Moutinho before the referee called it off with 27 seconds to go. We’ve seen him knock out the champ, Aljamain Sterling, against all odds and emerge with his hand raised against Petr Yan despite even bigger odds.
We’ve even seen him lose. His one loss came against none other than Marlon “Chito” Vera, the man he faces in a rematch at UFC 299. In the first fight, O’Malley and Chito fought in a noise-cancelled room at the UFC Apex, which made it all the more surreal when O’Malley hurt his foot, and the next thing you know was eating big elbows on the ground before the ref stopped it. O’Malley has always denied the loss, but the official record still reflects it happened.
Heading into his first title defense, the lanky O’Malley is a star. He wears his hair in different colors and has opted for bright pink trunks in homage to Miami Vice (or something) for UFC 299. He can be seen in white furs sitting cageside at events. He’s not quite an iconoclast (like Nate Diaz), and he’s not quite the bombastic loudmouth (like McGregor), but he is a kind of unicorn in that you can’t look away (like a psychedelic in sunglasses).
He’s the right main event for UFC 299 and a perfect headliner for the weekend overall. What would a victory mean for O’Malley at UFC 299? He has indeed cast an eye on Topuria, the new lightweight champion who is tentatively scheduled to have his first title defense in Spain. He has batted eyes with boxing’s Gervonta “Tank” Davis because big-picture thinkers in the fight world these days leave no plot of soil unseeded.
But the most logical fight happens to be the most tempting one of them all. A battle against the merciless, ceaseless cardio fiend Merab Dvalishvili, winner of 10 straight fights in the bantamweight division, the one name that looks primed to pull the plug on the “Suga” show once and for all. Should O’Malley get the mic last on this ridiculous weekend, in celebration of another victory, the UFC will find out just how big of a star O’Malley is.