Martial Arts News

WOW!! History made!! 🤩

🇲🇩 Valeriu Mircea submits Leo Brichta to become the first Moldovan champion in KSW history!!! #KSW91 pic.twitter.com/QxCF16Kx5h

— KSW (@KSW_MMA) February 17, 2024

Advertisement

Valeriu Mircea took Leo Brichta into deep waters and drowned the Prague native with a rear-naked choke in the fourth round of the KSW 91 main event Saturday at Home Credit Arena in Liberec, Czech Republic.

With the win, Mircea claimed the vacant interim Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki lightweight title and set up an eventual title unification showdown with champion Salahdine Parnasse. Mircea (30-8-1) notched his fourth straight win, but it didn’t come easy.

The fight opened up like a chess match, with Britcha holding the edge on the feet. Mircea’s guard was held low at Brichta (12-4) and routinely made him pay for it. To even the odds, Mircea took the fight to the ground and had his way.

Soon the fight became a battle of wills. Whenev…

The PFL vs. Bellator main card has taken a hit, as Jesus Pinedo has withdrawn from a proposed featherweight clash against Patricio Freire for undisclosed reasons.

Advertisement

As a result, the PFL announced Saturday that the fight is off the card. It is unclear if Pinedo vs. Freire will be rebooked at a later date. PFL vs. Bellator takes place on Feb. 24 at Kingdom Arena in Riyadh, Saudia Arabia, and is headlined by a heavyweight showdown between Renan Ferreira and Ryan Bader. The main card airs on pay-per-view via ESPN+.

Pinedo captured the 2023 PFL featherweight championship by ending his season with successive victories over Brendan Loughnane, Bubba Jenkins and Gabriel Braga. The two-time UFC veteran has complied a 23-6-1 career mark over the course of a professional tenure that began in 2013.

Freire, who is Bellator MMA’s reigning featherweight champion, is coming off back-to-back losses to Chihiro Suzuki and Sergio Pettis. Prior to that, “Pitbull” …

A strawweight clash pitting Stephanie Luciano (5-1) against Julia Polastri (12-3) has been added to UFC on ESPN 53.

Advertisement

The news was first reported by Ag.Fight.Prior to the booking of this matchup, both women were set to face separate opponents in the same month. Luciano was initially slated to take on Shauna Bannon on the same card, while Polastri was gearing up for a meeting with undefeated prospect Josefine Lindgren Knutsson on March 2. However, with the other bouts falling apart due to undisclosed reasons, Luciano and Polastri are now set to battle inside the Octagon.

Both fighters will make their UFC debuts after earning their way into the promotion through Dana White's Contender Series. Luciano will enter the Octagon on the heels of a unanimous draw against Talita Alencar in their DWCS 2023 Week 7 clash in September last year. Prior to that, the Brazilian was on a two-fight winning streak in Jungle Fight.

On the other hand, Polastri will …

[embedded content]

The speculation surrounding the main event of UFC 300 has reached a fever pitch in the last few weeks. One of the matchups that has been on the radar is Israel Adesanya vs. Dricus Du Plessis for the middleweight title.

Advertisement

Eugene Bareman, Adesanya’s longtime head trainer at City Kickboxing, told The MacLife that “The Last Stylebender” is already in camp for a possible clash at UFC 300.

“I can say that we are ready to fight. Israel is ready to fight.” Bareman said. “He is in camp, has been in camp, and we answered that call. ‘Can you be ready for this?’ And we assessed it because Israel is coming off an injury... And we decided as a team that, yeah, let's get into camp. Let’s come back a little earlier at, some risk, some proper risk. There is a strong possibility that this fight could happen on this date and let's act as if we are fighting on that date. So, we are ready to go.”

The City Kickboxing head also explained the reason…

━━━━＼ お知らせ／━━━━ONE Championshipとパートナーシップ契約締結━━━━━━━━━━━━━━𝐎𝐍𝐄 𝐅𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐍𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭／𝐎𝐍𝐄 𝐅𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐅𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭𝐬年間通して全大会を日英解説版で独占見放題ライブ配信詳細👉 https://t.co/oHfAITbpAn

重大発表、引き続きご期待下さい

— U-NEXT 格闘技 公式 (@UNEXT_fight) February 14, 2024

Advertisement

ONE Championship has taken another step towards expanding its ever-growing audience by signing an exclusive deal with Japanese streaming platform U-Next.

The deal will provide Japanese viewers exclusive live and on-demand access to ONE Championship's events. What's more, all programming will be available with both English and Japanese commentary, undoubtedly enhancing accessibility to the cards presented by the Singapore-based promotion.

Discussing the implications of the deal, Tenshin Tsutsumi, President and CEO of U-Next, stated:

“We are delighted to announce that the world's largest martial arts organization, ONE Championship, with …

#ONEFridayFights19 highlight video: Jonathan Haggerty clobbers Felipe Lobo pic.twitter.com/ZZT4dKNwQe

— Sherdog (@sherdogdotcom) February 17, 2024 Kickboxing and muay thai champ Jonathan Haggerty is already looking to a new horizon: mixed martial arts.

One Championship made sure to put one of its stars on the marquee of ONE on Prime Video 19, allowing two-sport champion Haggerty (22-4, 8-2 ONE) to defend his 145-pound muay thai throne. Aggressive challenger Felipe Lobo (22-9, 3-2 ONE) was not remotely afraid of the man with the hefty gold belt, and gave Haggerty everything he had for two-plus rounds until Haggerty found the finishing blow in the form of a devastating right hand.

As Haggerty calmly fired off body kicks from a safe distance in the early going, Lobo grew tired of absorbing the blows and crashed the pocket with fiery fists. The Brazilian laid into the champ with a lengthy surge of punches, stringing body shots into more to th…

ONE Championship’s next Amazon Prime event is set to unfold at the iconic Lumpinee Boxing Stadium in Bangkok for ONE Fight Night 19 “Haggerty vs. Lobo.” Sherdog will have live play-by-play coverage of every thrilling moment, ensuring you don't miss out on any of the excitement starting at 8 p.m. ET.

The event is built around two-sport king Jonathan Haggerty, who will put his skills to the test against Felipe Lobo for the promotion’s muay thai bantamweight world championship. The battle of wills has an exciting backstory scripted around the time Haggerty fought Fabricio Andrade at ONE Fight Night 16. Lobo was cornering Andrade in that fight and after “The General” had just dispatched his charge, Lobo seized the opportunity to challenge the champ.

Advertisement

Round 1 Saenchai starts off strong with solid straights and leg kicks. Chuikov tries to back up Saenchai but can't land anything. They get back to the center, and Saenchai drops his opponent with a huge righ…

Despite not getting the finish, Ilyas Eziev put on a scintillating performance in his promotional debut at ONE Friday Fights 52.

The 22-year-old went up against undefeated Kazakh prospect Asset Anarbaev (7-1) in a three-round bantamweight clash at the Lumpinee Boxing Stadium on Friday and walked away with a one-sided unanimous decision victory on the scorecards.

Advertisement

Eziev’s constant pressure kept Anarbaev on his heels for the majority of Round 1 while the Russian kept unleashing blistering straight lefts time and again. Halfway through the opening frame, Eziev managed to take Anarbaev to the ground and land several knees before the Kazakh found a way back to his feet and successfully disengaged.

In the second round, Eziev managed to replicate his success in the previous frame, regularly tagging his opponent with strikes from the outside while keeping his opponent’s back against the ropes. Anarbaev seemed to have nothing for the Belarusian apart from a …

Against all odds, the Ultimate Fighting Championship will still have 12 fights on the UFC 298 billing.

On Friday morning, the UFC announced during the UFC 298 weigh-in show that Justin Tafa had suffered an injury that would be keeping him from his heavyweight fight with Marcos Rogerio de Lima (21-9-1). An hour later, the promotion stated that it was working on a replacement fighter to keep Lima on the card. That fighter would be Tafa’s brother, Junior Tafa (5-1), who was cleared and allowed to weigh in and serve as the replacement. This is the first such occasion of one brother replacing another in organizational history, but not the first overall in the sport of MMA.

Lima stays on the lineup in hopes of putting a 33-second knockout loss to Derrick Lewis in July 2023 behind him. Before getting lamped by “The Black Beast,” the Brazilian had strung together two wins over Andrei Arlovski and Waldo Cortes-Acosta—while landing a rare submission on the former in quick fashi…

[embedded content] On extremely short notice, the Ultimate Fighting Championship has pulled off the 'ol switcheroo.

Headlining the 12-fight UFC 298 event is a featherweight title tilt between champion Alexander Volkanovski and challenger Ilia Topuria. Both men successfully made weight for the fight, as did the remainder of the lineup. While one fight was nixed before the weigh-ins when Justin Tafa suffered an injury, Tafa's brother, Junior Tafa (249), was cleared to replace him against Marcos Rogerio de Lima (261.5).

Advertisement

Volkanovski (26-3) is looking to make his sixth successful title defense. However, "The Great" has lost two of his last three fights as he fell short against Islam Makhachev in two bids to win the lightweight championship. The 35-year-old is coming off his first knockout defeat since 2013 and will look to show he still has plenty left in the tank. Volkanovski officially weighed 144.5 pounds.

Meanwhile, the undefeated Topuria (14-0) is…

Rarely has a rivalry been so prolific that the competitors want to face one another a fifth time.

At Pride Final Conflict 2003, Wanderlei Silva and Quinton Jackson battled it out in the finals of the 2003 middleweight (205 pounds) tournament. After six-plus minutes of combat, Silva emerged the victor courtesy of a seemingly unending series of knees and soccer kicks. The two met again nearly one year later at Pride 28, this time for the Pride middleweight strap on the line. Silva ultimately decimated his rival with knees in the second stanza, causing a bloodied “Rampage” to fall through the ropes after getting knocked out.

Advertisement

The story was not over despite two knockout victories in favor of the Brazilian, as both former Pride Fighting Championships fighters made their way to the Ultimate Fighting Championship after the former’s dissolution. At UFC 92 in December 2008, the 205-pound sluggers met for a third time in a title eliminator, and Jackson got t…

After some rejiggering, the Ultimate Fighting Championship is now making a flyweight title eliminator a five-rounder in Atlantic City.

At the end of January, the scheduled main event of UFC on ESPN 54 between Sean Brady and Vicente Luque fell through due to the former’s injury. While Luque is getting a new opponent, per the Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey—the venue of the fight card—it will not remain as the main attraction. In its place will be the 125-pound tilt between Erin Blanchfield (12-1) and Manon Fiorot (11-1), likely for a shot at the belt. The UFC announced this change on Thursday.

Since joining the promotion in 2021, New Jersey native Blanchfield has been a woman possessed as she moved up through the division. Starting with a pair of decisions that year over Sarah Alpar and Miranda Maverick, Blanchfield began finishing women in the Octagon the following year. In her 2022 campaign, “Cold Blooded” tapped J.J. Aldrich with a guillotine choke and …