Usman Nurmagomedov is one of the biggest names on the PFL roster, but might be allowed to walk to the UFC when his contract runs out.
Unbeaten lightweight champion Nurmagomedov will defend his title against Archie Colgan at the promotion’s UBS Arena event on July 30. It is widely known that this will mark the final fight on his promotional deal which he entered when the PFL bought Bellator in 2023.
Predict how a fight between PFL lightweight champion Usman Nurmagomedov and UFC lightweight champion Ilia Topuria would go!
CEO John Martin will offer him a new deal and make his case for sticking with the promotion. However, it’s no secret that Nurmagomedov has ambitions of going to the UFC to pursue the lightweight title that his cousin Khabib Nurmagomedov and close friend Islam Makhachev held.
PFL CEO willing to let Usman Nurmagomedov go to UFC
In the early days of PFL, the promotion would at times pay above the odds to bring in aging stars of the sport in an effort to make a splash. Perhaps their biggest investment was in 2024 when they brought Francis Ngannou in for a massive purse, which ultimately ended up in commercial failure.
Their new strategy with John Martin at the helm is based more in building a rounded out roster, as opposed to focusing too heavily on individual stars on big money. As such, they won’t be begrudging Usman Nurmagomedov if he decides to go elsewhere, the former Turner CEO explained.
“For Nurmagomedov his legacy is clear,” Martin told Home of Fight. “His legacy is clear, he’s walking around with a lot of confidence and a lot of aura. This is his last fight under the agreement, we haven’t really engaged in any discussions with him yet.
“We’d like to see and get through the fight to see what he wants to do. He’s a great part of the PFL, we love having him here and if it makes sense for us to do it we’d love to have him stay, we just have to wait and see what happens.
“If he really wants to go off and go somewhere else then we’ll have to deal with that too… In our job and our position there’s something the UFC has done really well over the years which is that the brand really has to be first and foremost.
“You have a portfolio of fighters and an ecosystem from finding the next star and we’ve got a number of those exciting young fighters coming up. Then you try to create stars and keep them for as long as you can and as long as it makes sense.
“But there’s no one star or two stars that will effectively represent the entire organization. In terms of our making of stars, we still have some distribution issues to correct on our side to make sure that we get our brand out to more and more people.
“Usman is an elite fighter, I’ve said since the moment I joined here that I believe he’s one of, if not the best lightweight in the world right now. I stand by that. The UFC has great lightweights but Usman seems to be a fighter that doesn’t have any weaknesses at the moment.”
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