Paddy Pimblett has found the one door into Ilia Topuria’s head that’s already been kicked open, and he wants to spend six weeks standing in it with a microphone.
Talking to All Out Fighting, the Liverpudlian said he’d love to coach The Ultimate Fighter opposite Topuria, then immediately predicted it will never happen. “I think he will be scared to do it because he knows that I will get on his head that bad that he would not be able to focus on the fight cause I would be winding him that much,” Pimblett said. He closed with the kind of line that gets clipped by every account on your timeline: “I would love him to… but I just don’t think he has the balls.”
My take: Paddy is right about the weakness and wrong about what Topuria should do with it. Topuria should say yes, and say it loudly, because his silence is now doing more damage than anything Paddy could say in the Apex.
Gaethje Drew the Map
Before June, calling Topuria scared of trash talk would have sounded ridiculous, because he was the one dishing it out. In the buildup to the UFC White House card, Topuria went full supervillain, down to a video depicting Justin Gaethje’s funeral and a special white flower presented to the American. Great bit. I love a villain who commits to the costume.
Then Gaethje swung back with a dig at Topuria’s divorce, and according to Essentially Sports, El Matador looked visibly rattled. The common read, and I’m with it, is that he fought emotional, hunted a first-round knockout he never got, emptied the tank, and watched his corner stop it in Round 4. That’s the whole blueprint, public and on tape, with a White House backdrop. Paddy watched the same fight we all did and took notes.
This isn’t a new obsession for him, either. Pimblett has said before he’d get under Topuria’s skin badly enough to knock him out, the way Conor McGregor did to Jose Aldo. Every trash talker carries that fantasy around in his back pocket. Usually it’s delusion. After June it reads more like a scouting report.
The Awkward Footnote Paddy Would Rather Skip
Before we hand Pimblett a psychology degree, one detail. Gaethje beat him too. UFC 324, January 24, 2026, T-Mobile Arena, unanimous decision, 48-47, 49-46, 49-46. So the guy promising to break Topuria mentally is 0-1 against the same man who broke Topuria physically. Paddy at least made it to the scorecards, which counts as a point in his favor if you squint. It’s also exactly the ammunition Topuria could fire back across a TUF set for six straight weeks if he had the stomach for it.
That’s why the show is worth doing for Topuria. Picture two guys who both lost to Gaethje this year, sharing a building with their teams, trying to prove whose loss meant more. Think of a Real World season where one roommate keeps a running list of your worst week and reads from it at breakfast. That’s prestige trash TV, and the knife cuts in both directions.
Why the Silence Hurts Him
Topuria’s trainer, Jesus Gallo, has pointed toward a February 2027 return after Topuria was medically cleared in September. Since then the Georgian-Spaniard has been chasing a Gaethje rematch and throwing out glove-tampering allegations against Gaethje. On Pimblett, a beef that goes back to their hotel altercation at UFC Fight Night London in 2022, he’s said nothing.
I understand the logic. You want the man who beat you, not the loudmouth from Liverpool. The rematch plan has a problem named Arman Tsarukyan, though. His win over Mauricio Ruffy at UFC 331 may have moved him to the front of the line for Gaethje’s title, as Essentially Sports noted. If that fight gets made, Topuria is staring at a February target with no Gaethje available, and the obvious money fight is the one he refuses to discuss.
Dana White sounds interested. At the UFC 332 post-fight press conference he said, “I love the idea of that, but a lot of things determine how things play out,” before adding that “that would definitely be a good one.” That’s vintage White hedging, but he’d also floated Topuria against Pimblett or Gaethje on The Jim Rome Show back in September. The boss already likes the pitch.
Every week Topuria stays quiet, Paddy gets to write the storyline for him. “He’s scared” is a lazy line most of the time. It sticks when the other guy just got shaken by a divorce jab and won’t answer a coaching invite. The fix is simple: sign the TUF deal, sit across from Paddy in the Apex, and let him run his mouth for six weeks without flinching. If Topuria can’t manage that, the February return is going to look a lot more like a guy avoiding Liverpool than a guy chasing gold.
