5 Likeliest Opponents For First UFC Title Defense

Tom Aspinall is the UFC’s latest heavyweight champion.

UFC boss Dana White announced Saturday that the previous champion, Jon Jones, had retired from the sport rather than fight Aspinall, and so the organization elevated Aspinall from interim to full champion. Jones, meanwhile, will be dumped from the roster, the heavyweight rankings, and the pound-for-pound charts.

When reacting to the news, Aspinall promised to be an “active” champion — perhaps a dig at Jones, who has fought just once since winning the belt in 2023. The British slugger will meet UFC brass in the coming days as he’s in Las Vegas to attend International Fight Week and UFC 317.

GIVEMESPORT will be meeting him. But before our interview, we go through five opponents who Aspinall could face at some point in the future — ranked from least to most likely.

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A crossover fight against the likes of world heavyweight boxing champion Oleksandr Usyk will likely not take place any time soon, though it’s not outside the realm of future possibilities. This is because Usyk has a high-stakes rematch against Daniel Dubois planned for the coming month. However, he’s recently spoken out about a possible bout against Alex Pereira, either in boxing, UFC, or both.

Usyk, though, would fit into the heavyweight division rather than Pereira’s light heavyweight class, and so, if he’s serious about entering the Octagon, there is no one better than Aspinall to welcome him. The UFC has a gifted fighter as champion in Aspinall, but few opponents in the division to create a super-fight. Usyk would be an extraordinary coup if the UFC could recruit him once he’s done dominating boxing.

4

Rico Verhoeven

Another extraordinary fighter who rules their combat discipline ruthlessly, similarly to Usyk in boxing, is Rico Verhoeven, who is an all-time great thanks to his technical mastery of kickboxing. He’s a Fighter of the Year winner in that combat sport, and has Fighter of the Year honors, has won tournaments, and is the reigning GLORY heavyweight champion. Verhoeven’s best wins include Errol Zimmerman, Gokhan Saki, and Badr Hari.

Though he’s got far more experience in kickboxing than mixed martial arts, he’s been linked with a crossover fight against PFL MMA’s champion Francis Ngannou. UFC could sneak in front of PFL if it were to lure Verhoeven into the Octagon for a super-fight against Aspinall. It’s perhaps unlikely to happen any time soon, with Aspinall more probable to fight an in-house opponent in the UFC with Verhoeven — if the UFC were to draft him — fighting somebody like Jailton Almeida or Curtis Blaydes first.

It seems wildly unlikely Dana White would bring Francis Ngannou back into UFC, or entertain working with PFL for a cross-promoted bout involving their champion. However, there is arguably now no fight greater in all MMA than this. Should fan-demand increase, perhaps the money the fight might generate could tempt White to work with Donn Davis and Peter Murray at PFL to put both fighters into one cage, and see who wins.

Before Jones retired from the sport forever, he appeared interested in welcoming Alex Pereira to the heavyweight division. The Brazilian striker is the closest thing the UFC has right now to a bona fide superstar, having reigned atop the middleweight and light heavyweight division. There is an undeniable legacy at play as Pereira could become the organization’s first-ever three-weight world champion if he entered the heavyweight class, and won the title.

To do that, though, he’d have to take on Aspinall.

The fight is one of the biggest the UFC could make that doesn’t include recruiting champions from other sports. The UFC may want to shelve this fight, though, for when they land their next broadcast deal as it could headline a ‘Premium Live Event’ on a platform like Netflix, or Prime Video.

Though the aforementioned opponents would be viable challengers to Aspinall, and capable of creating a super-fight feel to any show that they headline alongside the UFC’s newest king, the clear contender to his throne is Ciryl Gane, who is the highest-ranked opponent in the division who Aspinall hasn’t already beaten.

The fight, by that metric alone, makes sense.

But then you factor in the speculation earlier this year that if Jon Jones kept dragging his fight on the prospective Aspinall fight than the event they were both supposed to headline would still contain ‘The Honey Badger’ but with a different man standing opposite him in the Octagon. Gane was always that man. Now, the UFC can make it happen.

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