Cris Cyborg is going to fight MMA again. The 41-year-old Brazilian told MMA Sucka in a recent interview that her Aug. 22 win over Ketlen Vieira at PFL Tampa, the fight the promotion marketed as her goodbye, was not the end of the line.
“Yes, I will fight MMA again,” Cyborg said.
That settles weeks of guessing. When the PFL announced the Tampa card back in June, it described the Vieira bout as Cyborg’s last MMA fight. She held up her end of the script, defending the PFL women’s featherweight title by unanimous decision and banking the 30th win of her career to move to 30-2. Then she stepped off the script in the cage afterward, hedging on what came next.
“I don’t know if I’m going to fight again, but I wanted to be a champion one more time and get my 30th victory,” she said that night.
The Vieira fight is the reason she’s staying. Vieira, a former ranked UFC bantamweight, missed the featherweight limit by more than seven pounds, so Cyborg defended her belt against a noticeably bigger woman. Cyborg told MMA Sucka she thinks the result proved she can still hang with the sport’s best, and she got specific about it.
“Ketlen was tough and certainly felt extremely strong. But even though she missed weight by over seven pounds, I was able to display great footwork and fight IQ to win four out of the five rounds. I landed almost double the strikes she landed over our 25-minute fight.”
Where she goes from here
This is where it gets interesting. Her PFL contract ran out with the Vieira fight, and the PFL is in the middle of a newly announced merger with Most Valuable Promotions. So Cyborg is shopping.
The obvious suitor is Scott Coker, who promoted her in Strikeforce and Bellator. Cyborg showed up at the launch of Coker’s new Ki MMA promotion in September, though being in the room didn’t mean she’d signed anything. A UFC return has been floated too, and she has said before that she wants a rematch with Amanda Nunes. Boxing is also on the table, since she’s kept taking bouts there.
She’s not short on confidence, either. On X on Oct. 6, she wrote that she hasn’t lost a fight in over seven years and listed her combined boxing and MMA record over that stretch as 18-0. The Uncrowned panel at Yahoo Sports still has her No. 4 in its October women’s pound-for-pound rankings, and its blurb on her basically predicted this.
Sal’s take: Anybody who bet on a clean retirement here should’ve known better, and I say that as a man who once took the under on Randy Couture’s career. Eight weeks off is no layoff, so my usual grumbling about old fighters returning cold at short prices doesn’t apply. What does apply is that “tested a little” by an overweight Vieira at 41 is a data point worth more than the 18-0 headline. The Nunes rematch makes for a great poster, but Nunes has her own business with Kayla Harrison on Nov. 14 at UFC 334 at Madison Square Garden. Until that’s settled, the phone call that makes the most sense for Cyborg comes from Coker.
