Petr Yan just told the internet that Max Holloway hits harder than Alex Pereira, and the internet would like a word.
The UFC bantamweight champion posted a video on social media ranking 10 fighters by punching power, playing the blind-ranking game where you slot each name without knowing who’s coming next. Bloody Elbow broke down the list, and the order is a little wild. “Do you agree with my #1?” Yan wrote on X. That’s a fair question, since his No. 1 was Petr Yan.
The full board, from the top: Yan, Holloway, Pereira, Ilia Topuria, Tom Aspinall, Sean O’Malley, Justin Gaethje, Jack Della Maddalena, Paddy Pimblett and Alexander Volkov.
How it got weird
The first two names Yan drew were Topuria and Pereira, both former two-division champions. He put Pereira third and Topuria fourth. Fans jumped on that immediately, and most of the pushback had the same logic: once Pereira’s name comes up, nobody else on that list is going to top him, so you lock him in at No. 1 and move on.
The resume backs them up. Pereira’s knockout of Magomed Ankalaev last October was his seventh KO in eight UFC wins, spread across middleweight and light heavyweight.
Then came Holloway. Yan had already placed Aspinall, O’Malley and Gaethje, and he put the Hawaiian above all of them, plus Pereira, plus Topuria. Holloway’s reputation was built on volume, on drowning people in punches over five rounds. He rarely gets mentioned in one-shot power conversations, which is exactly why the No. 2 slot set off the replies.
The reaction on X was swift and not especially kind. “Max at 2 is wild,” one fan wrote. Another offered a quick fix: “Swap Max with Gaethje and it’s perfect.” One reply cut deeper: “Well, no, that makes zero sense,” a user wrote, while pointing out that Yan himself hasn’t scored a knockout since 2020. And then there was the simplest one: “Did he even listen to the question?”
What’s next for Yan
Yan gets to make his own case on fight night soon enough. After winning back the 135-pound title, he defends it against Merab Dvalishvili in their trilogy fight at UFC 333 on October 24 in Abu Dhabi, on the same card as Alexander Volkanovski vs. Movsar Evloev.
It’s a heavy week of fighting for a guy who just spent his downtime filming a sponsored ranking video (he tagged 1win in the post), but these things are part of the job now, and Yan clearly had fun with it.
My take: putting yourself first is the only honest move in these games, and nobody should knock a champ for believing in his own hands. Holloway over Pereira is the part I can’t sign off on. Pereira’s whole career is a highlight reel of men falling down, and seven knockouts in eight UFC wins is the kind of number you don’t get to rank third. If Yan wants the No. 1 spot to look less like a joke, the fastest way to fix it is putting Dvalishvili down on October 24, since a decision win won’t settle much of this argument.
