issue 220
August 2025
In an exclusive sit-down with E. Spencer Kyte, Paddy Pimblett calls his shot at Ilia Topuria, and insists he’s the kryptonite to the current king of lightweight.
It’s a very good time to be Paddy Pimblett. In April, the 30-year-old lightweight collected his seventh win in as many appearances inside the Octagon. He smashed through Michael Chandler in a dominant performance that made it clear the mop-topped Scouser was a legitimate threat and a consistently entertaining talent. Does beating Chandler prove anything? Detractors point to Chandler’s subpar record since arriving in the UFC as evidence that he’s over the hill. However, Paddy has just the retort.
“People think MMA math works, but it doesn’t,” laughed Pimblett, speaking with Fighters Only while stationed in bed, trying to coax one of his twin daughters to finally go to sleep. “The one thing that pisses me off is that people were saying, ‘Paddy can’t fight for the belt after beating Chandler,’ when Charles (Oliviera) has just fought Ilia (Topuria) after beating Chandler, and he’d done five rounds with him, nearly got knocked out in the fifth, when I absolutely detonated Chandler for three rounds. “No one’s ever put a beatin’ on Chandler like that, and he’s fought Oliveira, Justin (Gaethje), Dustin (Poirier); no one has ever put a beatin’ on him like that.”
Like it or not, Pimblett spits facts. Oliveira stopped Chandler early in the second, but that was getting clipped and forced to navigate a competitive first round with the former Bellator standout. Gaethje went the distance, beating him on the scorecards. Poirier finished him in a quicker time but did so after dropping the second round on all three scorecards.Those fights all felt close. Pimblett’s third-round stoppage win over Chandler felt like a landslide. At the time, few genuinely thought it was enough to elevate the Liverpool man into a championship fight, but timing is everything, and his couldn’t have been better.
A RIVALRY REKINDLED
Pimblett and Ilia Topuria do not like each other, having engaged in a Diaz-esque interaction where bottles of hand sanitizer were thrown after the Georgian took umbrage with a Pimblett tweet. At the time, they fought in different divisions. The obvious tensions made a grudge match feel unlikely but a fan’s dream. Fast forward to UFC 317, where Topuria claimed the lightweight title. Several hopefuls sat in the crowd as the UFC broadcast panned to both Gaethje and Tsarukyan, with the announce team quickly recapping their respective cases for contention in unscripted moments. But the camera cut to Pimblett and Topuria called him out, a request Pimblett was happy to fulfill.
“I wasn’t gonna put a finger on him,” Pimblett said of his interaction with Topuria inside the Octagon that night. “I was just there, and just saying a few little sentences, I got under his skin enough for him to push me.”
What did he say?
“I said a few times, ‘You can’t knock me out,’ and then he said, ‘I’ll submit you,’ and I was like, ‘That’s ‘cause you know you can’t knock me out,’” recalled Pimblett, snickering. “I said, ‘I will school you, little boy.’ I think ‘Little Man’ is what I said because he is little. He’s like five-six or something, and I’m five-foot-11. I’ll kick him all around the cage. Styles make fights, and I think I’m his kryptonite. I could genuinely see me ‘McGregor-Aldo’ing’ him because he’ll come out and just try and swing a big shot on me, and I can see me catching him on the chin straight away and putting him down. No one has really tested his chin, apart from Jai (Herbert), who I’ve sparred several times. Jai tested his chin with a head kick, and I would do the exact same. I’d be keeping him on the end of the range, and I’d be kicking him all over the cage.”
DREAM FIGHTS
Though he’s had facing Topuria on his personal wish list since their feud, Pimblett admitted he wasn’t expecting to roll into a championship opportunity. He’s said he would have to face a Top 5 opponent and win before finally getting a chance to challenge for gold, and he was more than happy to follow that path. All that changed when his rival ascended to the top of the lightweight division and called him out.
“Before Ilia won the belt, I was planning on fighting in Abu Dhabi, and I still would have if that fight’s not coming up,” said Pimblett, who thought he’d be paired up with Gaethje on the annual October pay-per-view event in the UAE. “But I want Ilia. I want that fight. Obviously, people are gonna laugh because I’m ranked nine, but I think that’s the fight to make,” he added in a matter-of-fact tone, stating an opinion shared by many in the MMA community. “I think it’s quite stupid how Beneil Dariush ended up going back in front of me after beating Moicano, who was ranked below both of us.As I say, I think me and Topuria is the fight to make. There’s history. There’s bad blood, and you haven’t got any other fight like that to make in the UFC at the minute. It’d be the biggest fight they’ve been able to make in years. The biggest fight they can make is me versus Ilia.”
A MASSIVE OPPORTUNITY
A potential bout between Topuria and Pimblett feels like a colossal battle between two heated rivals in any number of other sports. England versus Spain in a World Cup showdown. Michigan versus Ohio State in American collegiate football. This theoretical pairing feels like the matchup that can draw in a massive crowd and would merit taking the event from an arena to a stadium.
“This would be huge, lad,” began Pimblett when asked his thoughts on how big the potential championship clash could be in terms of fan interest and the possible size of audience. “They’d probably want to do it in Vegas because it’s the ‘Fight Capital of the World,’ but if you do that, they’re gonna have to do the Raiders stadium, because that’ll sell the Raiders stadium out. They can’t do that in the T-Mobile with 20,000.”
Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas holds 65,000 and will host the super middleweight fight between Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez and Terrence ‘Bud’ Crawford in September, which could serve as a test balloon.
“Me and Topuria needs a stadium. It’s not big enough, the T-Mobile Arena, for me and him to fight there. I’d love to fight him in the Bernabeu, I’d love to fight him in his own backyard, even though it’s not his own backyard. He lives in Benidorm. He’s a glory hunter that supports Real Madrid, but I’d fight him there, and everyone knows me dream’s to fight at Anfield, so once I beat him and get the belt, I’d love to defend it at Anfield.”
EVERYONE WINS
It’s not just Pimblett who is eager to see this spectacle.
“When I was walking around San Diego and L.A. and Boston and New Jersey, all people kept saying to me was, ‘Are you gonna f*** Ilia up? You gonna f*** Ilia up?’” Pimblett said with a smile. “The amount of people who kept saying that to me as I was just walking around is ridiculous. He’s beaten everyone’s favorite fighters, so everyone wants to see him lose,” he added with a laugh. “He’s beat Max. He’s beat Volk. He’s beat Charles. He’s beaten everyone’s favorite fighters, so everyone wants to see him get beat. I’m not gonna sit here and lie and say he’s not a good fighter just because I don’t like him. He’s a brilliant fighter. He’s got good grappling, even though it’s not on my level. His boxing is great. He’s got power. He’s putting on a show for people by knocking people out, but lad, I’m his kryptonite. When he fights anyone else, he doesn’t fight with emotion. He goes in level-headed. When he fights me, he’ll be going in with emotion, and it’ll be the death of him.”
LIVING THE DREAM
Whether the fight materializes or not remains to be seen. Pimblett is yet to discuss the matchup with the UFC. But regardless of whether it happens now or in another fight, Paddy feels like he’s on the precipice of UFC gold.
“Nothing shocks me because I always said, ‘I’m gonna be a UFC champion,’” he said when asked how he feels about his ongoing run of success and rise to being both the face of UK MMA and one of the biggest stars in the sport, full stop. “It’s bosh. It’s great. But I always said I was gonna be the face of UK MMA. It doesn’t faze me because I always said it was going to happen. People always say to me, ‘The more you climb up the rankings, is it like (more pressure)?’ And I’m like, ‘Naw,’ because I predicted all this in my future, I knew all this was gonna happen, so when things happen, it doesn’t shock me, it doesn’t surprise me. I just take it all in stride because I knew it was coming.”
Pimblett has held that belief for as long as he can remember, going so far as to save an old tweet where he declared his intentions. This prompted a fan to say he’d turn himself into a eunuch should ‘The Baddy’ become a UFC champion. Pimblett hasn’t forgotten it and would require a hefty donation to his charitable foundation to let him off the hook.
A MATTER OF TIME
Holding trolls to their promises aside, Pimblett bet on himself long before he first touched down in the UFC five years ago, turning down a pair of offers from the promotion back when he was a star on the rise under the Cage Warriors banner. To this date, Pimblett believes doing so was the best decision he’s ever made.
“Yeah, 100 percent,” he said when asked if struggling with the trappings of stardom earlier in his career had made his ascension in the UFC easier to navigate. “That’s why, as I’ve said before, I’m so glad that I didn’t accept the UFC’s first or second offer, especially the first one. (The first offer) was right after I won the belt, and it was around that time that I went off the rails. I started going out all the time. I was still speaking to my close mates, but I was going out with a different group of people who basically wanted to be with me to get them into nightclubs and get things. I even fell out with the missus and things like that, and if I had gotten into the UFC then, it would have been way worse because the UFC is a global thing, whereas Cage Warriors is more of a UK, Europe. Without that happening back then, I wouldn’t be in the position I am today.”
THE LATE BLOOM
Today, he’s knocking on the door of the lightweight champion, and what’s more fascinating is that the self-described late bloomer believes his prime will follow the path he took to puberty and arrive later than most.
“I don’t think I’m gonna hit my prime properly until I’m 34, 35,” said Pimblett. “Every fight I feel fitter, stronger. People talk about my physique, but I’m not arsed about my physique. I have an eight-pack. Yeah, sound. It’s not about having an eight-pack. It’s about being strong and having the fitness to go five rounds, and I have that in abundance now. When I moved up to lightweight, I wasn’t even a proper lightweight. I was just a fat featherweight that couldn’t make the weight anymore. I didn’t put any muscle on. I just moved up to lightweight, and it showed when I fought Soren Bak. I looked like a child next to him. I was 23 and I looked like a little kid stood next to him. He was a big dude. Grappling with him, he was much bigger than me, much stronger than me, and it showed in the fight. You need these lessons to realize what you need. I only started doing S&C in like 2021, just before (the UFC debut). It might have been the end of 2020, start of 2021, that I started doing a proper regime with my nutritionist and S&C coach, Paul Reed. He’s the best in the business; there is nobody like him.”
STATING HIS CASE ONE FINAL TIME
In the wake of Pimblett joining Topuria in the Octagon, everyone started voicing their opinions. One of the loudest voices was Gaethje, who not only believed he deserved an opportunity, but went so far as to say he would feel like his services were no longer needed in the UFC if the company opted to go in a different direction. When asked about Gaethje’s comments, Pimblett began with a drawn-out “Yeah” and a smirk before prefacing his remarks with praise for the Colorado-based contender.
“I don’t want to say nothing bad about Justin Gaethje because I really like him,” he said. “I’ve met him in the past, and I spoke to him at Ilia’s fight. He was sitting right next to me. I shook his hand. I really like Justin Gaethje, so I don’t wanna, same with Dustin, same with Charles, I don’t really wanna say a bad word about any of them because they’re legends. But Justin does sound like a big baby when he’s saying all this. People are saying I don’t deserve a title shot. I’m on a seven-fight win streak. Five finishes. Justin’s just beat Fiziev, who came in on a week’s notice off a two-year layoff, who was ranked 12. I come in and beat Chandler, who was ranked 8. People need to make it make sense. And he got knocked out by Max the fight before. Max is a brilliant fighter and one of the best human beings we’ve seen step into the Octagon. He’s such a nice dude, but he’s got knocked out by Ilia less than a year ago, so how’s he gonna step up and fight him?”
THE NEXT BIG THINGS
Depending on how things shake out, Pimblett would be happy to share the cage with either man. He was expecting that he would have to face Gaethje in Abu Dhabi in October. He admires everyone in the division, except for one person.
“I respect everyone in me division. Everyone in the lightweight division in the Top 15 are amazing fighters, except for Arman Tsarukyan, because he’s a little gob-shite,” he said of the former No. 1 contender, who served as the official backup fighter for Topuria’s bout with Oliveira.
It feels like Arman is the least mentioned man in this public debate over who should face the new champion. So if a title fight didn’t come his way, would Pimblett entertain a No. 1 contender's bout with the streaking Armenian standout?
“I don’t even know if I’d want to give him any fans, but I’d happily punch his face in,” he said of Tsarukyan, who hasn’t fought since beating Oliveira at UFC 300. “He’s someone I genuinely don’t like — eatin’ caviar for breakfast, the little stuck-up, rich c***.”
CALLING HIS SHOTS
Between telling anyone that would listen he was going to emerge victorious before each of his first seven UFC appearances and his bold, early adulthood promise to win UFC gold, Pimblett has thus far done pretty well on the prediction front. So might it be time to add “Paddy the Predictor” to his collection of nicknames and identifiers?
“You could say that,” he said with a smile. “I don’t call it as good as McGregor, but I do call it. I’ve always said I was gonna end up being UFC world champion, and it’s gonna happen, mark my words.”
At this point, who’s gonna doubt him?
