Movsar Evloev has heard every complaint about his scorecard-heavy record, and he has no plans to answer any of them by changing how he fights. Speaking with Uncrowned ahead of his featherweight title shot against Alexander Volkanovski at UFC 333 this Saturday in Abu Dhabi, Evloev said Volkanovski has been publicly insisting nobody can beat him on the cards, and he read that as an attempt to get inside his head.
“I can beat anyone by decision because of my style. And Volkanovski is no exception,” Evloev said. He followed it with a line that should interest anyone who has sat through 15 minutes of him grinding someone into the fence: “But for now, we’re looking for a finish much earlier than five rounds.”
The numbers behind the criticism are simple. Evloev is 10-0 in the UFC since his 2019 debut, and every one of those fights went to the judges, which adds up to 32 rounds and the full 160 minutes the promotion has given him. Dana White piled on after Evloev beat Arnold Allen in Toronto in early 2024, saying Evloev “sucks the air out of the arena” and calling it “the least fun fight anybody’s ever seen.” Evloev was 18-0 at that point. Instead of a title shot, he was handed former bantamweight champion Aljamain Sterling and then a surging Lerone Murphy, and he got past both.
The timing does him no favors. Over the past month the UFC released Michael Page, who went 5-1 in the promotion with all six fights going the distance, and Farid Basharat, who is 16-0 overall and 7-0 in the UFC with six of those seven decided on the cards. Across the four events since UFC Vegas 121 in September, only 10 of 51 fights have reached the judges, under 20 percent.
Volkanovski, the 38-year-old champion, is the one who argued Evloev had earned this, and Evloev gave him credit for it. “Yeah, he’s a real champ,” he said. “He’s not fake. The real champs want to fight best fighters in division.” He also told Uncrowned he doesn’t think a loss to him would be what pushes Volkanovski into retirement, suggesting the champion’s legacy is already complete and the grind of camp after camp wears on anyone. Evloev, who trains at American Top Team in Florida, said his own 12 years in the sport amount to nearly half his life.
He credits his mother for the work ethic. She runs the house for a large family, gets up before everyone, and still can’t stop working, he said, in a hometown where he lives on one street with eight uncles. He knows the crowd in Los Angeles booed him at the press conference face-off, and he didn’t sulk about it: “they were booing me, but they love him, because he deserves it.” Abu Dhabi, he expects, will sound different.
My take: a fighter who is unbeaten in the UFC and has never let anyone take a single fight from him on the cards doesn’t owe anybody an apology. White and the matchmakers made him run a gauntlet that would have broken most contenders, and he walked out the other side with his record intact. Decisions this clean against Allen, Sterling and Murphy come from control, and control against Volkanovski over 25 minutes would be the hardest thing anyone at 145 has done in years. If he pulls it off Saturday, the people booing him in Los Angeles will have to sit through a lot more five-round wins.
