Fast facts
- Division: Bantamweight (current and two-time UFC champion, former interim champion)
- Record: 20-5
- Nationality: Russia
- Team/gym: Archangel Michael Club
- Notable wins: Merab Dvalishvili, José Aldo, Deiveson Figueiredo, Cory Sandhagen, Urijah Faber, Magomed Magomedov
The older brother said no. He was training boxing in Dudinka, up in Krasnoyarsk Krai, and he didn’t want his kid brother tagging along. So Petr Yan followed him anyway, quietly, and showed up to learn the sport he’d been told he couldn’t have. He stayed eight years and came out a Master of Sport in boxing at 64 kg.
That detail tells you most of what you need to know about the man who now holds the UFC bantamweight title, sits No. 4 in the UFC’s pound-for-pound rankings and tops the division in Cagefile’s data. He has always gone where he wasn’t invited.
A restless kid in Siberia
Yan was born on Feb. 11, 1993. His father has mixed Chinese and Georgian-Russian roots, his mother is Russian. By sixth grade he was doing ITF taekwondo and getting into fights at school and on the street, often enough that his family moved more than once trying to pull him out of it. Boxing gave all that a structure. Later he finished a degree in Physical Culture and Sport at Siberian Federal University in Krasnoyarsk, which is the kind of quiet, practical credential that rarely makes a fight-week promo package.
Berkut, and the loss that made him
He debuted in December 2014 at Eurasian Fighting Championship’s Baikal Fight, knocking out fellow debutant Murad Bakiev in Round 3. Absolute Championship Berkut signed him in 2015, and he went straight at a Brazilian named Renato Velame, who already had 26 pro fights, and beat him on the cards. A 47-second submission of Kharon Orzumiev followed, then a first-round knockout of Artur Mirzakhanyan, then a decision over Murad Kalamov that earned him a title shot.
The first loss of his career came on March 26, 2016, in Moscow, five rounds with Magomed Magomedov for the ACB bantamweight belt. Magomedov got a split decision. Plenty of people thought Yan won, including ACB president Mairbek Khasiev, who promised a rematch, and the fight was voted the promotion’s best of 2016. Yan beat Ed Arthur, then got his rematch at an event literally titled ACB 57: Payback on April 15, 2017, and took the belt by unanimous decision. In his first defense that September he dropped Matheus Mattos with a left uppercut in Round 3 and the referee waved it off.
He was 24 and had already lived a full arc: a disputed loss, a correction, a title.
The UFC run
The UFC signed him in January 2018. What came next was a methodical climb. A first-round TKO of Teruto Ishihara. A Fight of the Night decision over Jin Soo Son, who missed weight and handed Yan 20 percent of his purse. A Round 2 corner stoppage of Douglas Silva de Andrade at UFC 232. Decisions over John Dodson and Jimmie Rivera. He signed a four-fight deal, then got offered a six-fight deal right after the Dodson win, which is the UFC’s way of admitting it underpriced you.
After elbow surgery for synovitis, he walked through Urijah Faber at UFC 245, knocking him down in the second and out in the third. Then he went after the champion. “I think it’s pretty obvious he is ducking me and doing everything he can to avoid fighting me,” Yan said of Henry Cejudo. Cejudo retired instead, and on July 12, 2020, at UFC 251, Yan stopped José Aldo in Round 5 for the vacant title.
The lean years
This is the stretch that turns a good fighter into a sympathetic one. At UFC 259 against Aljamain Sterling, Yan was up 29-28 on two cards when he threw an illegal knee in the fourth and lost the belt by disqualification. He won the interim title over Cory Sandhagen at UFC 267 in a fight the UFC nominated for its President’s Choice Fight of the Year, then dropped a split decision to Sterling in the unification bout at UFC 273.
Then came UFC 280. Yan lost a split decision to Sean O’Malley, and 25 of 26 media outlets had scored it for Yan. Sherdog’s editors named it the 2022 Robbery of the Year. Four months later Merab Dvalishvili beat him clearly by unanimous decision, the one loss of this stretch nobody argued about. Three losses in four fights, two of them on scorecards people still fight about in group chats.
What he did next is the part I keep coming back to. A month before UFC 299 in March 2024, Yan hurt his groin. In the first round against Song Yadong, he tore his ACL and meniscus. He changed his game plan on the fly and won a decision anyway. He followed it with decisions over Deiveson Figueiredo and Marcus McGhee, who has since moved to 6-1 in the UFC, and on Dec. 6, 2025, at UFC 323, he beat Dvalishvili by unanimous decision to become a two-time champion. Sherdog called it the Upset of the Year and named him Comeback Fighter of the Year. CBS Sports went further and named him its 2025 UFC Fighter of the Year.
How he fights
Yan is a switch-stance boxer who wins with his feet as much as his hands. He takes small steps instead of chasing, cuts the cage, changes stance and hand fights until the opponent runs out of exits, then punches when they pause or try to turn out. He fights behind a high guard and counters right off the block, staying close enough to answer. In the clinch he’s a menace, mixing body and head, collar ties, knees and elbows, especially on the break. He holds a blue belt in jiu-jitsu but rarely hunts submissions. His wrestling lives in trips and throws off caught kicks and body locks, and CBS Sports lists his takedown defense at 86%.
The numbers back the eye test. He has landed more significant strikes (1,456) than anyone in UFC bantamweight history, and he’s tied with Cody Garbrandt for third in knockdowns with 10. He also owns the third-longest average fight time in the division, at 17:38. He likes it long and he likes it ugly.
Off the mat, he’s an Orthodox Christian with a wife and two sons.
What’s next
The trilogy with Dvalishvili happens Oct. 24 at UFC 333 in Abu Dhabi, on the card headlined by Volkanovski vs. Evloev. Everything at 135 is waiting on it. O’Malley, who beat Yan in that disputed fight, is hoping Yan wins so the rematch becomes the obvious next booking. Payton Talbott, fresh off becoming the first man to stop Figueiredo with strikes at UFC 332, wants O’Malley and admitted at the post-fight press conference that a Yan win muddies his path. “If Yan wins, then I don’t know we’ll have to see,” Talbott said. MMA Junkie put it plainly in its Sean Shelby’s Shoes column: “The entire structure of the bantamweight division revolves around the fallout of UFC 333.”
The kid who followed his brother to a gym he wasn’t welcome in is the one everybody else is now waiting on.
