Alexander Volkanovski will fight for a UFC championship for the 12th consecutive time when he meets undefeated featherweight contender Movsar Evloev at UFC 333 on Oct. 24. The UFC confirmed the streak in a post on X with the caption “Adversity is a privilege,” and the card goes live at 2 p.m. ET on Paramount+, with Abu Dhabi tourism partners tagged on the promotion.
CBS Sports framed the matchup as Volkanovski chasing featherweight history. Twelve straight title fights is the kind of number that usually belongs to someone who has stopped being a contender or a champion and become a fixture. Evloev arrives with no losses on his record and a reputation that has followed him for years, the reputation of a wrestler who wins and wins without lighting anything on fire.
Jose Aldo, who knows something about holding the featherweight division together, did not help that reputation this week. In a video shared by MMA Fighting, the former champion said that if he ran the UFC, “I’d wait for him to lose for the first time and then cut him because he’s a guy who doesn’t sell, a guy who puts on boring fights, a guy who doesn’t draw attention.” That’s a hard line to hear from a legend, and Evloev now has a chance to answer it in the biggest fight of his career.
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The crowd at the UFC 333 press conference didn’t seem to share Aldo’s view. According to Championship Rounds, fans started chanting Evloev’s first name while Volkanovski was answering a question, and Evloev told them to stop and “respect the champ.” Earlier in the week, the same account posted a moment from an interview with Nina Drama, who covered up before speaking with him. When she asked “Wait, can I look at you?” he replied, “Yea of course. I can’t look at you if you weren’t wearing this.”
Volkanovski, for his part, showed up to the press conference dressed as Joe, his character from the Street Fighter movie. He also has plans after fight week. Spinnin Backfist reported that he’s heading to Dagestan to shoot an episode of Cooking With Volk alongside Islam Makhachev, and Volkanovski described the idea himself: “We want to do a whole hunting on horseback, catch stuff, cook over a fire....you can just imagine how good that content will be.”
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The lighter moments sit next to something heavier. ESPN ran an interview with Volkanovski under the headline “I sacrificed a lot of myself to be where I am,” which is about as close as a fighter gets to describing what a dozen straight championship camps cost.
My take: Aldo is wrong about Evloev, and the press conference proved it in a small way. A fighter who shushes his own chant so the other man can finish his sentence has been raised in a room where respect is drilled as hard as single legs, and that kind of composure tends to carry into the cage. Volkanovski has beaten pressure fighters before. He has rarely faced one who looks this calm about it. On Oct. 24, we find out whether the champion’s experience outweighs a perfect record.
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