Alexander Volkov has a dance partner for Abu Dhabi. The UFC announced Friday on X that Volkov will fight Rizvan Kuniev at UFC 333 on October 24, with the card streaming on Paramount+ and the promotion listing a 2 p.m. ET start.
The announcement read “Heavyweight business to attend to” with a steaming-face emoji. For once the emoji showed up with names and a date attached, so I’ll let it slide.
On paper, heavyweight matchups don’t get much tighter. The latest UFC Meta Rankings, updated after UFC Vegas 122, have Volkov at No. 4 and Kuniev right behind him at No. 5. Ahead of them sit champion Ciryl Gane, Tom Aspinall, Sergei Pavlovich and Alex Pereira. Josh Hokit is No. 6 and Curtis Blaydes is No. 7.
View post on X
The booking drops into the middle of a loud fight over who deserves a crack at Gane. The champion defends against Hokit in the UFC 334 main event at Madison Square Garden on November 14. Hokit is 4-0 in the UFC with wins over Blaydes and Derrick Lewis. Pereira, who lost to Gane at UFC Freedom 250 in June in a fight Gane finished after landing 11 illegal strikes to the back of the head, has spent the last week arguing he was owed the rematch. He gets Pavlovich instead, in the five-round co-main of UFC 335.
Volkov’s name kept surfacing in that argument. Daniel Cormier, answering Pereira on his YouTube channel, said that if Hokit hadn’t gotten the call, Volkov would have been the more logical pick than Pereira because of his history with Gane. Henry Cejudo, on the podcast he does with Kamaru Usman, named Volkov and Blaydes as fighters with better claims than Pereira. MMA Mania, writing up Cejudo’s comments, described Volkov’s decision loss to Gane a few years back as a robbery.
So Volkov walks into Abu Dhabi with two former champ-champs vouching for his spot in line. Kuniev walks in as the guy ranked one spot below him who gets to take that spot with a win.
The heavyweight fight is one of 14 bouts on a stacked card. Alexander Volkanovski defends his featherweight title against 20-0 Movsar Evloev in the main event, and Petr Yan and Merab Dvalishvili finish their trilogy for the bantamweight belt in the co-main. In the lineup Bloody Elbow published, Volkov vs. Kuniev sits fourth, behind Lone’er Kavanagh vs. Ramazan Temirov.
This is matchmaking I can get behind. No interim belt, no campaigning on social media, no begging for a rematch. Two guys ranked next to each other get locked in a cage and the winner gets to make his case with something better than a podcast quote. Whoever has his hand raised on October 24 is the cleanest name in the queue when Gane and Hokit finish their business at the Garden on November 14.
