Paddy Pimblett sat down with Joe Rogan and decided Ilia Topuria owes him a thank-you note.
On a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Pimblett said the two-division champion’s rapid rise got a big push from their feud, and that he had no clue who Topuria was when it started.
“When all that tweeting sht was getting done, I’m just tweeting back to people, I didn’t even know who the fck Ilia Topuria was,” Pimblett said. “How the fck am I meant to know who he is? He’s just some little dckhead. No one even knew who he was, and it just went from there.”
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The Liverpool lightweight did give Topuria some credit, in his own way. He said Topuria built up fast while Pimblett was sidelined for a year with an injury from his Jared Gordon fight. Then he took it right back.
“But as I said, I don’t think he would have been built up that fast if he didn’t use my name for clout,” Pimblett said.
How this whole thing started
The beef goes back to 2021, when Pimblett got into it online with Georgian fans and called them “fake Russians.” Topuria, who is Georgian, condemned the comments. Pimblett later apologized, but that didn’t cool anything down.
In March 2022 the two ran into each other in London, and it turned physical enough that Pimblett threw a hand sanitizer bottle toward Topuria. As far as weapons go, it’s the most fight-week item imaginable.
They met again at the UFC 282 pre-fight press conference, where Pimblett was promoting his fight with Gordon and Topuria was set to face Bryce Mitchell. They went at each other there too. Pimblett said that was the next time they’d been in the same room after London.
Where they stand now
Topuria (17-1 MMA, 9-1 UFC) went on to win two UFC belts, which makes Pimblett’s clout argument a little harder to sell. But he’s coming off the first loss of his career, dropping the UFC lightweight title to Justin Gaethje in June.
Pimblett (24-4 MMA, 8-1 UFC) is going the other direction. He quickly submitted Benoit Saint Denis at UFC 329 and put himself back in the lightweight title conversation.
That puts them in the same division, both looking for a path back to gold, with years of genuine bad blood between them. A fight that used to be a fun hypothetical now has a real shot at getting booked.
My take: Pimblett has a point about the early days. Nothing gets a prospect noticed faster than a public scrap with the most-talked-about guy on the roster, and in 2022 that guy was Paddy. But nobody tweets their way to two belts. Topuria did the rest himself. If Pimblett wants the last word on who built whom, the only argument left is in the cage, and after Gaethje took the lightweight strap in June, the matchmakers have every reason to give him that chance.
