Joshua Van wants a second belt, and he already knows whose waist he’d like to take it from. The UFC flyweight champion said on Outta Pocket with RGIII that a superfight with bantamweight champion Petr Yan would be his dream scenario down the line, and he sounded like a guy who has thought about this a lot more than once.
“That would be ideal (to fight Petr Yan for a second belt), right? Petr Yan is someone I really watched when I first came into the game because I really like his style and we kind of have the same style, so I really watched him,” Van said, via Bloody Elbow.
MMA Sucka ran the story under a “Hell Yeah” headline, which tracks with the energy. Van came across as a fan of Yan’s striking and a believer in his own hands. Those two things can live in the same body. Plenty of fighters idolize the guy they eventually try to knock out.
View post on X
Two Champs, One Style
Start with the obvious. Van is only 25 and he’s already the best flyweight on the planet, with back-to-back title defenses over Alexander Pantoja and Tatsuro Taira. Beating Pantoja would be enough to make most careers. Van followed it by turning back Taira, and he’s done it with a boxing-heavy attack that makes 125-pound fights feel like a Rocky montage set on fast-forward.
Yan, meanwhile, is sitting on top of 135 after beating Merab Dvalishvili twice. That’s a sentence I’d have bet against a couple of years ago, and plenty of fans now argue it puts him in the conversation as the greatest bantamweight ever. He’s a boxing-based fighter too, which is exactly the point Van was making. Two pressure strikers who like to sit in the pocket and trade is the kind of matchup you circle on the calendar before it even exists.
The Line Is Long
Now the speed bumps. Van has business first, a title defense at UFC 336 against long-time rival Manel Kape. That one carries real history, and a champ talking about moving up before a rivalry fight is either supremely confident or tempting fate. Maybe both.
Yan’s dance card is packed too. He still has rematches with Sean O’Malley and Song Yadong in front of him, and neither of those is a layup. If either man trips him up, the whole superfight conversation evaporates.
My take: I love it. Champions who play it safe drive me up a wall, and here’s a 25-year-old titleholder openly naming the scariest striker one division up and saying he’d welcome the smoke. Van gets points for honesty, too. He admitted he learned from Yan’s tape, which means he’s also admitting he knows exactly how dangerous the guy is. That’s a fighter calling his shot with eyes open. Now he has to go beat Kape at UFC 336, because nobody books a champ-versus-champ fight for a guy who just lost his belt to a rival.
