Natalia Silva’s first week as UFC women’s flyweight champion came with a promotion. ESPN moved the Brazilian up its women’s pound-for-pound top 10 on Thursday, framing the jump as Silva making the most of a golden opportunity. The update follows her unanimous decision win over Wang Cong for the vacant 125-pound title in the UFC 332 main event on Oct. 3 at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City.
The scorecards read 48-47, 48-47 and 49-46, which is about as tidy as a five-round title fight gets these days. The belt was open because Valentina Shevchenko vacated it with a shoulder injury, and that detail has followed Silva out of Utah. Yahoo Sports included her on a list of five current UFC champions who won gold without beating the previous titleholder, and Ariel Helwani wrote on X that he believes you should have to beat the champ to become the champ. MMA Fighting’s own UFC 332 report asked whether Silva is the true women’s flyweight champion.
Her resume makes a decent rebuttal. Silva entered UFC 332 on a 14-fight winning streak and was unbeaten through her first eight UFC appearances, with wins over former champions Jessica Andrade, Alexa Grasso and Rose Namajunas along the way. MMA Fighting has her at 9-0 in the promotion now and unbeaten for nine years. When it became clear Shevchenko wouldn’t defend again quickly after her November 2025 decision over Zhang Weili, Silva took the Namajunas fight instead of sitting on the sidelines.
Shevchenko broke her silence after the Wang win, congratulating Silva on X before adding, “keep it warm, I’m coming soon for my belt!” Silva wasn’t charmed. “The belt isn’t hers anymore, the belt is mine,” she told MMA Fighting, and then went after Shevchenko’s activity rate. “She would take a year between fights,” Silva said.
As for what’s next, Silva said she wants to fight again in the first half of next year and doesn’t plan to hold her first defense for Shevchenko’s return. She named Grasso and Erin Blanchfield as possible first-quarter 2027 challengers, and said Shevchenko would have to respect the rankings and the queue like everyone else. She also said she has never fought in the UFC in Brazil and would love to defend the title at home.
My take: the lineal argument is a fine bar conversation, but Silva already beat three former champions to get here, and you can’t hand someone a better path to legitimacy than that. Grasso is a name she has already solved, so the fresh question is Blanchfield, and that’s the fight I’d book first. If the UFC wants to put it in Brazil in the spring, even better. Shevchenko can watch from home, which, as Silva pointed out, she apparently already does.
