Islam Makhachev has started talking like a man who can see the end of the road, and Michael Bisping thinks the road should run through 185 pounds before it stops.
On his YouTube channel, the former middleweight champion made the case that if Makhachev beats whoever wins the interim welterweight title fight between Carlos Prates and Michael Morales, nobody gets to tell him no on a middleweight title shot. “Moving up to 185 and trying to become the triple champ? I like the sound of that and if anyone deserves it, it is Islam Makhachev,” Bisping said, as reported by Bloody Elbow. He followed it with the line that carries the whole argument: “You can’t say that Islam Makhachev hasn’t earned that opportunity.”
He’s right. I’d go a step further and say the condition he attached is exactly what makes the case airtight.
The clock changed everything
A year ago this conversation wouldn’t have had the same weight. Back then Makhachev was talking about wanting many more fights to keep stretching his win streak, the kind of comment you hear from a champion who assumes the years will keep coming. That tone is gone. He has now said his next fight will be one of his last, after deciding not to defend his welterweight belt in January and instead waiting for one clear contender to emerge.
That decision is what set up Prates vs. Morales for the interim strap. It also turned Makhachev’s remaining career into something finite and countable. When a fighter tells you he has only a handful of nights left, the question stops being who he should fight and becomes what those nights are for. Bisping’s answer is history, and I don’t see a better one.
The structure he’s proposing is also fair, which matters. Makhachev wouldn’t be skipping the line or ducking his own division. He’d be clearing it first. Beat the interim champion, whether that’s Prates or Morales, and the welterweight picture is settled by his own hands. Prates has already said he plans to finish Makhachev’s legacy when they meet next year, so the welterweight piece of this has real stakes attached, and nobody is pretending it’s a formality.
The Pereira precedent cuts both ways
Bisping leaned on Alex Pereira to back his point, and it’s a good comparison precisely because it didn’t end in a coronation. Pereira won back the light heavyweight title, vacated it, and got an interim heavyweight title shot earlier this year in pursuit of becoming the first three-division champion. He came up short.
Some people will read that as a cautionary tale. I read it as proof the UFC already accepts the principle. A decorated champion earned the right to take a historic swing, took it, and lost. The sport didn’t collapse. Nobody argued afterward that he hadn’t deserved the attempt. If Pereira’s resume justified that opportunity, a fighter who has held gold at lightweight and welterweight and then clears out the interim champion at 170 clears the same bar.
The loss also tells you something about the price of these runs, which brings me to the part of this story I find most interesting.
Makhachev knows how hard it is
Before his first welterweight title defense in August, Makhachev was asked by UFC on Paramount about chasing a third belt. “I’m not gonna say no (to trying to become the first three-weight champion),” he said. Then he got honest in a way champions rarely do. He talked about how tough it was to put on size after moving up from lightweight, and he pointed to that same problem when looking at middleweight.
“It’s gonna be really hard, man, to gain weight, to become big and also, that division is very dangerous, we will see,” he said.
That quote is the reason I’m fully on Bisping’s side. Makhachev isn’t selling himself as a natural middleweight. He’s telling you he remembers the work of adding muscle to a frame built for 155, he respects the men at 185, and he’s still not closing the door. That’s a fighter weighing a real risk with clear eyes, which is a very different thing from a champion chasing a third belt because it would look good on a poster.
There’s a version of the end of a career where a great fighter takes safe defenses, protects the streak and walks away with the record intact. Makhachev’s earlier comments about extending his win streak suggested that might be his path. His decision to step away from a January defense and his openness to a move he openly calls dangerous suggest something else. If he wants the harder ending, he has earned the right to choose it.
The welterweight division still gets its say first. Prates and Morales meet for the interim title, and the winner gets Makhachev. If the champion wins that fight, the next call should be to the middleweight division, and I’d want to hear Makhachev answer it.
