UFC CEO Dana White wants Islam Makhachev and the rest of the promotion’s champions fighting more often. Yahoo Sports and MMA Junkie both ran the story Wednesday under the same headline: White wants to see Makhachev and other UFC titleholders stay active. The published reports available to me don’t include White’s full remarks, so I won’t put words in his mouth. The message is simple enough, though. The boss wants his belts defended on a schedule, and he named the most prominent champion in the building to make the point.
The timing is hard to ignore. Two days earlier, Carlos Prates unloaded on Makhachev over a January fight that Prates says the champion backed out of. The comments circulated on X through Championship Rounds and other accounts, credited to reporter Laerte Viana.
“He chickened out,” Prates said, adding that he plans to come back and beat Makhachev “twice as badly as I was going to before.”
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Prates also claimed the promotion was unhappy with how things played out. “The UFC was pissed. They didn’t like it,” he said. That’s Prates’s account of the company’s mood, not an official UFC statement, and nobody from the promotion has confirmed it in the material available here.
He kept going. Prates argued that a healthy champion has no business turning down fights, because the contract is the job. “If you don’t want to fight, vacate your belt and that’s it,” he said. His sharpest jab was aimed at how the January date was handled in public. He said Makhachev should have stayed quiet if he was unsure, and that it would have been less bad to “fake an injury or something” than to talk openly about maybe fighting.
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Makhachev’s side of the January story doesn’t appear in these reports, and no new date or opponent has been announced for him.
White, meanwhile, has had a busy week of his own. Page Six reported that a Netflix documentary about him, directed by Gotham Chopra, is in production for early 2027. He also announced on X that Deontay Wilder vs. Jai Opetaia will go on the undercard of Tyson Fury vs. Anthony Joshua. So the man has plenty of things to book. He’d like a Makhachev title defense to be one of them.
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Sal’s take: I can’t hand you a line on a fight that doesn’t exist, and that’s exactly the problem White is pointing at. A champion who sits gives oddsmakers nothing to post and gives contenders like Prates nothing to do but talk, and Prates has clearly been doing a lot of that. White going public two days after Prates called the champ a coward reads to me like a nudge, not a coincidence. Prates claiming the UFC was mad is one man’s word. The CEO saying the same thing in softer language on the record is another. When both are pointed at the same guy in the same week, I’d start looking for an announcement before I’d bet on another long wait.
