Michael Bisping has weighed in on who Sean Strickland should be fighting, and his answer is Islam Makhachev rather than Khamzat Chimaev. Sportskeeda reported on November 1 that the former middleweight champion believes Makhachev would be a better matchup against Strickland than Chimaev. The report available to us doesn’t lay out Bisping’s full reasoning, so I won’t fill in the blanks for him. The pick itself is the news.
Bisping carries weight on this kind of question. He knocked out Luke Rockhold at UFC 199 to become the first British fighter to win a UFC title, defended it against Dan Henderson at UFC 204, then lost it to Georges St-Pierre at UFC 217. He retired after a knockout loss to Kelvin Gastelum three weeks later and went into the UFC Hall of Fame on July 5, 2019.
Makhachev is the more interesting half of this conversation right now. He’s 29-1 and sits at No. 1 in the Knockout Daily welterweight rankings. He became the 11th double champion in UFC history by beating Jack Della Maddalena at UFC 322, and his win over Ian Machado Garry at UFC 330 pushed his UFC winning streak to 17, the longest the promotion has ever seen. He passed Anderson Silva to get there.
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He also doesn’t sound like a man thinking about a quiet exit. At the UFC 330 press conference, he said: “17 is not gonna be enough, I will be sure nobody will break my record. It’s going to be 20, MINIMUM.”
That line sits a little awkwardly next to another comment Championship Rounds posted on X on October 30, where Makhachev said his next bout would be among his last. “My next fight is one of the last in my career. They say Prates is too dangerous for me and Morales is too good for me,” he said, adding that he wants to face the best of them. Notice who he named. Neither name is Strickland.
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There’s been some heat on Makhachev lately, too. Flyweight Joshua Van came to his defense over what Dovy described on X as recent backlash, saying, “The guy has done everything he needs in the sport.” Van also pointed out how quickly people turned after calling Makhachev the GOAT following the Garry win.
So Bisping is pitching a fight that Makhachev himself hasn’t asked for. If the champion means it about three more wins and only a few more fights, his own shortlist (Prates and Morales) is where the next booking is most likely to come from, and Strickland would have to talk his way onto it.
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