Nate Diaz turned up at UFC Edmonton on Saturday night, parked cageside at Rogers Place with a few friends. The UFC didn’t treat it like an awkward cameo. It put him on the broadcast and then put him on its own channels.
The official UFC account posted a clip on X captioned “Out here with the homies,” tagging Diaz and noting he was catching all the action, with a plug for the card streaming live on Paramount+. A YouTube Short went up around the same time under the line “Nate Diaz in the house!”
That’s the event, more or less. The posts didn’t include a callout, a statement or any hint that business was being done in the front row. It was Diaz watching fights with his crew, and the UFC deciding that was worth a camera shot.
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Why it’s worth a camera shot is the interesting part. Diaz’s most recent fight didn’t happen under the UFC banner. On May 16, 2026, he faced Mike Perry in an MMA bout on Jake Paul’s inaugural MVP MMA card. So the promotion just handed free promo to a former star of its own who last competed on somebody else’s show. Matchmakers and social media teams don’t always talk to each other, but somebody signed off on that clip.
The man on the other side of that May fight has had a rough few months. Perry was booked to face Dillian Danis on August 29 in Orlando. Danis pulled out, Perry headlined the Duel Arena card against Brandon Jenkins instead, and he lost by first-round TKO, according to Essentially Sports.
Now his bare-knuckle home might be done with him too. Ahead of BKFC’s Newark event, CEO David Feldman was asked whether Perry’s next fight would come in BKFC. “I don’t think so,” Feldman said, before adding that the two sides are still talking and that “I think they’re going to have some news pretty soon about where he’s going.” Reports cited by Essentially Sports say Perry has two fights left on his BKFC deal, and a 2027 matchup with Darren Till has been discussed without an agreement.
As for Diaz, nothing about what’s next came out of Edmonton. No fight was announced, no opponent was named, and nobody from the promotion has said publicly that a return is on the table. Anyone telling you otherwise off a 10-second clip is reading tea leaves.
My take: I’ll still read them a little. The UFC has a long memory and a short list of guys who move the needle just by sitting down, and Diaz is on it. Promotions don’t usually go out of their way to celebrate people they’re mad at. Is that a contract? No. It’s a door the UFC didn’t bother closing, on a night when it had every reason to keep the camera on its own fighters. Diaz, for his part, looked like a guy who came to watch fights and leave. That’s about as Nate Diaz as it gets.
