Ilia Topuria is talking about the exit. In a Spanish-language interview that made the rounds on r/MMA on Oct. 14 (the poster pointed non-Spanish speakers to the auto-generated English captions), Topuria said his fighting career is now in its last few chapters. He turns 30 in January.
Some of the chatter around the clip still calls him the undefeated featherweight champion. Neither part holds up. Topuria vacated the 145-pound belt in February 2025, won the vacant lightweight title from Charles Oliveira at UFC 317, and then lost to Justin Gaethje on June 14 at UFC Freedom 250 on the White House South Lawn, where Gaethje unified the lightweight titles. So this is a former two-division champion, four months removed from the first loss of his UFC run, saying the end is closer than the beginning. I only have the clip and the quote, so I won’t guess at which specific goals he wants to tick off before he goes. I can tell you why the math pushes him toward a short runway.
The scale already made one decision for him
Topuria’s weight history is the least glamorous part of his résumé and, in my read, the most important. In 2018 he missed weight for a Cage Warriors bantamweight title fight in Antwerp, won the fight quickly and left without the belt. In January 2022 he was pulled from UFC 270 over a medical issue tied to his weight cut. When he vacated featherweight, Dana White listed difficulty cutting weight first among the reasons, alongside a lack of interest in the division’s contenders and a plan to stay at lightweight for good.
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That’s three documented weight problems across roughly seven years, and I have zero patience for fighters who keep paying that bill with their health. Topuria at least stopped paying it. The cost is that his career now lives entirely at 155, and 155 is the division where he just got stopped. When a fighter’s only remaining weight class is the one with the freshest loss, talk of the last few chapters sounds less like a mood and more like arithmetic.
What the game was built on
People remember the knockouts, and they should. Volkanovski went in Round 2 at UFC 298. Max Holloway went in Round 3 at UFC 308, the first time anyone had knocked him out. Oliveira went at 2:27 of Round 1 at UFC 317. But the foundation underneath all of that is grappling. Topuria started Greco-Roman wrestling at seven in Georgia, picked up jiu-jitsu at 15 after the family moved to Alicante, took silver in the juniors division at the 2014 IBJJF Europeans, and got his black belt in May 2018 alongside his brother Alex. He opened his pro career with four straight submission wins and tapped Bryce Mitchell in Round 2 at UFC 282.
Here’s my read on how those pieces fit. His 95.2% takedown defense ranks second all-time in the UFC, and that number is why his hands looked so frightening. When opponents can’t credibly threaten to wrestle you, you get to plant your feet in the pocket and throw with full commitment, because the punishment for over-committing (getting taken down) mostly never arrives. The wrestling and jiu-jitsu rarely showed up on the stat sheet. They showed up as permission to stand in front of people.
The Jai Herbert fight in March 2022 is the other side of that coin. Herbert dropped him with a head kick in Round 1, and Topuria came back and knocked him out in Round 2. I love that fight for the between-rounds adjustment and the recovery. It also showed what the pocket-heavy approach costs: you’re in range for the other guy’s best shots too.
The Gaethje loss
The sources I have give the result rather than the exchanges, so I’m not going to pretend to walk you through the round-by-round. What I can say is how it landed. Yahoo’s weekly power rankings dropped Topuria to fifth, called it a bad loss, blamed his “god-like complex” for getting in the way, and knocked him for ranting on X since. Raw UFC footage also circulated of his brother Aleksandre consoling him after the fight.
My read, offered as a read: a fighter whose whole system rests on winning the pocket is going to take a loss in that pocket harder than a fighter with three or four ways to win. Topuria has the grappling to rebuild around, and he hasn’t needed to lead with it at the UFC level in a while.
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How the remaining chapters line up
The lightweight queue is crowded and none of it currently runs through him. Gaethje has said he won’t fight again before the end of the year and has floated retiring as champion. Yahoo’s rankings mention rumblings of a Gaethje defense against Arman Tsarukyan, who just knocked out Mauricio Ruffy in Round 1. Then there’s Oliveira, who fights Diego Lopes for the BMF title in the UFC 335 main event on Dec. 12. Oliveira told MMA Fighting that a win puts him next in line ahead of Tsarukyan, pointing to his star power and his 2022 submission of Gaethje, even though Tsarukyan holds a 2024 split decision over him.
The chapter that obviously means the most is a Gaethje rematch. If Gaethje retires, that door shuts, and Topuria’s route back to gold probably means a vacant-title fight against Tsarukyan or the Oliveira-Lopes winner. A second Oliveira fight carries little appeal after a 2:27 finish.
Featherweight has moved on without him. Volkanovski, whom he took the belt from, headlines UFC 333 in Abu Dhabi on Oct. 24 against Movsar Evloev, the same man Topuria was originally booked to face at UFC 270 before Evloev withdrew. Holloway is coming off a sub-two-minute win over Conor McGregor at UFC 329. Given the weight history, I’d treat any talk of Topuria returning to 145 as noise until he’s standing on a scale there.
He’s clearly still training, for what it’s worth. New footage went up on Oct. 12, picked up by Championship Rounds and other accounts on X. My pick: he has two fights left, both at lightweight, and the first one gets booked only after Gaethje decides what he’s doing. Watch Dec. 12, because whoever wins in that cage is probably the name standing between Topuria and his final chapter.
