Aline Pereira and Smilla Sundell are locked in for the women’s bantamweight co-feature of Tuesday’s Dana White’s Contender Series finale, and both women made weight Monday in Las Vegas. Each came in at 135 pounds, according to weigh-in results from Cageside Press and MMA Junkie.
The winner, if she impresses the boss, walks out of the Meta Apex with a UFC contract. The show is DWCS 96, the 10th and final week of Season 10, and it streams on Paramount+ at 7 p.m. ET.
Pereira is the younger sister of former two-division UFC champion Alex “Poatan” Pereira, which is how most people will hear about this fight. She has her own hardware, though. She’s the current Karate Combat flyweight champion, and in MMA she’s 3-2 with two straight wins. The most recent came against Canada’s Jade Masson-Wong on the Rousey vs. Carano card on Netflix earlier this year. She’s 36.
Sundell is 21, which means she’s 15 years younger than the woman across from her and already has a world title on her résumé. She held ONE Championship’s strawweight Muay Thai belt before making the move to MMA, where she’s 2-0. Tuesday is a big jump in weight from strawweight, and a bigger jump in stakes from two pro fights.
That’s the catch with this pairing. Both women arrive with elite striking credentials earned under different rule sets, and neither has much of an MMA sample to judge. Cageside Press flagged Sundell’s thin record as another question mark, and the same logic applies to a 3-2 fighter with two losses already on the board. Nobody knows yet what happens when one of them gets put on her back.
The fight sits under a featherweight main event between Ilias Bulaid (9-0) and Erick Visconde (17-3). That one was supposed to happen in September, but the Moroccan-born kickboxer got sick and was pulled from the card. Rather than scrap it, the matchmakers pushed it to the finale.
The rest of the card, with weigh-in numbers:
- Welterweight: Luis Francischinelli (170) vs. Will Rentz (171)
- Middleweight: Davi Cabral (184.5) vs. Douglas Da Lapa (184.5)
- Lightweight: Jason Asher (154.5) vs. Gregory Foster (155.5)
Everyone on the card made weight, which is more than some pay-per-views can say.
My take: I love this booking. A Karate Combat champ against a ONE Muay Thai champ on a contract night is the kind of matchmaking that should happen more often, and the UFC’s women’s bantamweight division could use new faces. The Pereira name will get the clicks. But I’d lean toward the 21-year-old who won a ONE title before she could legally rent a car, because youth and volume tend to win close striking fights over three rounds. If Sundell gets her hand raised Tuesday night and the contract follows, she’ll be one of the youngest women on the UFC roster with a world title already on her shelf.
