Caio Borralho didn’t let fight week get weird. The moment the UFC booked him against Yousri Belgaroui for UFC 334, he sent a message to Alex Pereira, the man who will be working the other guy’s corner Saturday at Madison Square Garden.
Borralho told MMA Fighting the exchange was “very smooth.” He reminded Pereira that he’s a fan and that the two are friends. Pereira had even invited him to come train, which Borralho politely shelved now that they’ll be on opposite sides of the cage. He told Pereira he has the utmost respect for him, Glover Teixeira and the team, and closed with this: “After the fight, everything goes back to normal.”
The overlap here runs deep. Borralho has trained with Pereira multiple times, both in the United States and at his home gym, The Fighting Nerds in Sao Paulo. Belgaroui, a former GLORY kickboxer, joined Pereira at Teixeira’s team in Danbury to chase his UFC run.
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So does all that shared mat time hand Belgaroui a scouting report? Borralho doesn’t think it changes much. He said he and Pereira have done striking, MMA sparring and ground work together, so Pereira knows what kind of athlete Belgaroui is about to see. Then he turned it into a warning shot. “They know he can’t go to the ground with me. They definitely know that.”
Borralho is 8-1 in the UFC and coming off a win over Reinier de Ridder. Belgaroui is 3-0 inside the octagon with three knockouts since earning his contract on Dana White’s Contender Series in September 2024, stopping Azamat Bekoev, Mansur Abdul-Malik and Djorden Santos along the way.
That gap in résumé is what bugged Borralho at first. He said his first reaction was that the matchup didn’t make much sense. “I’m on my way to a title shot, but then, after thinking about it and calming down, it’s just another fight.” He said he asked the UFC whether anyone ranked higher was available. The answer was no, and he signed on the spot. “It never crossed my mind to turn down the fight,” he said.
As for fans telling him to shoot a double the second the bell rings against a knockout artist, Borralho pointed to his fights with Michal Oleksiejczuk, Jared Cannonier and Nassourdine Imavov as proof he can stand with dangerous strikers. “I’m a complete MMA fighter, and I have the striking to go toe-to-toe with any striker in the world,” he said. He added that Teixeira and Pereira have both acknowledged this is dangerous for both men on the feet and more dangerous for Belgaroui on the mat. His theory is simple: a pure striker facing a guy who can wrestle spends the whole night worried about the takedown, and that worry gets in the way of his offense.
Quick take: a contender who asks for a higher-ranked name, hears no, and says yes anyway without whining about it is doing the job right. Borralho also basically told Belgaroui’s camp his game plan is to make them guess, and he said it to Pereira’s face first. The guessing ends on the UFC 334 main card Saturday night at the Garden.
