Conor McGregor is 36 and hasn’t fought in the UFC since 2021. Jon Jones is 37 and abruptly retired over the weekend despite a lucrative offer for a superfight against Tom Aspinall on the table. Dustin Poirier, meanwhile, is 36 as he sets to enter his retirement fight in July.
Even the promotion’s most valuable individual brand of recent memory, two-division champion Alex Pereira, who headlined a trio of UFC’s most important events over the last two years, is 37 and fresh off a humbling title defeat.
To say the UFC is currently lacking when it comes to crossover star power in 2025 would be an understatement, which is why Saturday’s UFC 317 main event in Las Vegas during International Fight Week could be an important one for the company’s short-term future when former featherweight champion Ilia Topuria moves up to lightweight to challenge Charles Oliveira for the vacant title.
Topuria (16-0), the 28-year-old Georgian who now resides as a national sporting hero in his adopted home of Spain, arguably has more momentum than any other fighter on the UFC roster. The 2024 fighter of the year is fresh off of clean knockouts of pound-for-pound ranked legends in Alexander Volkanovski and Max Holloway over the last year alone.
But when Topuria aims for a second UFC title in as many weight divisions entering just his ninth trip to the Octagon, he assumed — like most fans and media members — that it would’ve come in a superfight against the defending lightweight champion in a matchup between the top two P4P fighters on the planet.
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Brent Brookhouse
“I was expecting to fight another guy, which is Islam Makhachev, but, unfortunately, he ran away,” Topuria told ESPN this week. “He decided to move up to the next weight division, as I did. He talked too much in the beginning but, finally, when he had to make a final decision, he decided to run away. I wasn’t expecting that from him but, at the end of the day, it is what it is. I’m fighting for gold which was my main goal from the beginning.”
Shortly after Topuria vacated his featherweight title, Makhachev did the same at 155 pounds despite the budding rivalry between them. But unlike Jones-Aspinall, a heavyweight summit built up for nearly two years that never came to fruition, there’s reason to believe that Makhachev’s move up in weight is only part of a larger story between the two fighters that will eventually end with one of the biggest matchups in company history.
Topuria, who held his own press conference earlier this week at the UFC’s Performance Institute in Las Vegas, all but guaranteed it, especially if Makhachev defeats new 170-pound champion Jack Della Maddalena in a fight that’s expected to take place later this year.
“If Islam becomes the welterweight world champion, for sure I’m going to push for that shot, also,” Topuria said. “And I will move up to the welterweight division.”
As equally cocky as he is humble with no shortage of flash or swagger, Topuria has very much become the breakout superstar that UFC needs most right now. And his prospective future fight against Makhachev, which would be even more massive if Topuria entered it looking to become the first three-division champion in UFC history, has the potential to become the hottest rivalry the promotion has seen since Khabib Nurmagomedov-Conor McGregor.
Even though he often talks tough when the topic of Makhachev comes up, Topuria is ultimately respectful of him and said this week he doesn’t believe Makhachev moved up in weight to avoid him.
“I would be lying to you if I told you that he’s ducking me,” Topuria told “The Ariel Helwani Show” on Monday. “I think he’s tired of the weight cut [and] he needs a new challenge. He moved to the welterweight division and he thinks he has a chance to become a double champion. I think that’s all he is trying to do.”
If there’s any fear that Topuria is putting the cart before the horse as it pertains to how much he’s talking about Makhachev when he has a fight scheduled first with former lightweight king Charles Oliveira, this is simply how Topuria operates. He famously changed his social media bios to read “UFC featherweight champion” before he ever fought for his first title yet continues to deliver in the biggest way when the pressure is on and the lights are the brightest.
Topuria’s other worldly confidence has rubbed some fans the wrong way, however. But for anyone who still looks like Topuria as a villain, the native of Germany believes it won’t take long before even they come around to realizing what he’s truly all about.
“Soon, they are going to be on my team, that’s for sure,” Topuria told ESPN. “To be honest, I prefer to be the good guy because this is who I am. But it may take a little bit longer for the people to realize I’m not a bad guy but whatever. At the end of the day, I care about what my family thinks about me, my friends and what I think about myself. It’s going to take some time for the people but soon they are going to realize that I’m not the bad guy.”
Should Topuria, who currently sits as more than a 4-to-1 betting favorite, prove he can defeat the 35-year-old Oliveira, fans will be surely waiting to see if he calls out Makhachev directly in his post-fight interview (and the promotion would be wise to play into it). But not only does Makhachev need to first win the welterweight title for this fight to be as big as it might eventually become, Topuria would prefer an immediate title defense against marketable British star Paddy Pimblett first.
The 30-year-old Pimblett has been a thorn in Topuria’s side after the two have exchanged trash talk publicly for years. It’s a fight that makes a lot more sense now that they are in the same division and Pimblett (23-3) is fresh off a stoppage of Michael Chandler to improve his win streak to nine.
Even though the Makhachev fight has every potential chance to become the defining fight of Topuria’s career, he believes a Pimblett matchup could be even bigger commercially.
“It’s just a matter of time,” Topuria told KevinIole.com last week. “If you ask me, it’s going to happen. I think that the people will love that fight because we have a history behind us. It’s going to be a great fight and a huge fight because it’s going to be a real, real fight.
“I think me against Paddy is going to be even bigger than me against Islam because the one who no one gives a f— bout is Islam. No one gives a f— about in Dagestan when he’s fighting. The people go to sleep and watch his fight in the morning. Even at home, who gives a f— about Islam? He doesn’t even know how to pronounce two words.”
Asked by Helwani whether his placement this weekend in one of UFC’s annual showcase cards signifies that the promotion looks at Topuria as their biggest star, “El Matador” chose to play it cool, just as he did when asked whether UFC has given him any assurances that a possible jump from an Oliveira fight directly into a Makhachev one was possible.
“I don’t like to talk about those kinds of things,” Topuria said. “They called me, they wanted me to fight in the International Fight Week. Of course, I’m not a dumb person and I know that I”m one of the biggest names in the game for everything that I have done. I don’t know that it puts me in a spot where I can say I’m the face of the game because we have many, many great athletes in the sport right now.
“We had that conversation [about fighting Makhachev next] also but you know how [UFC officials] are. They don’t want me to talk about anything that we talk in private. It could happen. It could happen, easy.”
None of these marquee fights — whether it be Pimblett next or Makhachev — will happen if Topuria doesn’t take care of business against the always dangerous Oliveira. That hasn’t stopped Topuria, however, from continuing to deliver such a bold prediction as he enters just the second 155-pound of his 16-fight pro career (Topuria knocked out Jai Herbert at lightweight in 2022).
At the end of the day, Topuria believes Oliveira’s come-forward style will be tailor made for his sublime combination punching and overall boxing skills.
“You can never count [Oliveira] out because he is a dangerous guy,” Topuria said. “He has the most finishes in the UFC history but I have faced those kind of situations many, many times with Volk or Max Holloway where no one could beat them or knock them out. But you have never faced me, you have never faced someone as skillful as me. The skill development I’m bringing in the sport, they have never saw that.
“[Oliveira] walks forward, this is all I need. The time that it takes me always to knock out my opponents is the time that it takes me to close the distance because they run away and move from side to side. Once I close the distance and I let go with my combinations, I knock them out. I respect [Oliveira] but I’m going to knock him out in the first round.”
Should Topuria do just that, it’s likely that he becomes the exact superstar UFC badly needs.