Pouya Rahmani has a picture in his head, and it’s a vivid one. Francis Ngannou flat on his back, Rahmani’s weight pinning him to the canvas, and a line of Cameroonians filing into the cage to help their guy stand up.
“When I put him down, brother, all of his country will have to come to help him get up from under my hand,” the unbeaten PFL heavyweight told Home of Fight, in an interview Bloody Elbow picked up this week. He kept going. “When I am on top of you, you are over, bye, bye, you know?”
I love it. I also think he’s skipping about four steps, and the first of those steps is standing across from him in Dubai next week.
View post on X
The résumé is real
There’s nothing manufactured about the confidence. Rahmani is an Iranian national wrestling champion who crossed into MMA and has gone 6-0, with four submissions and two knockouts. He’s also been busy outside the cage, picking up wins in Real American Freestyle and ACBJJ. In that Home of Fight interview he laid the pedigree out himself: “I was a national team player (in freestyle wrestling), I was world champion, I am world champion black belt jiu-jitsu. There’s levels to this game.”
Four of six by tap is a meaningful number at heavyweight, where most guys are happy to win a scramble and lean on someone. Rahmani finishes. That’s the part of his game I’d actually pay to watch.
And he isn’t pulling the Ngannou blueprint out of thin air. Stipe Miocic held Ngannou down for five rounds at UFC 220 in 2018 and took the belt home. That fight is the foundation every grappler builds his Ngannou fantasy on.
The problem is that blueprint is eight years old
Here’s where Rahmani’s pitch falls apart for me. The Miocic fight happened early in Ngannou’s career, against a version of him who barely knew what to do once his back touched the mat. By 2022 he was beating Ciryl Gane with his own wrestling. Sit with that for a second. The heavyweight whose famous weakness was being taken down used takedowns to beat one of the slickest big men the sport has produced.
View post on X
So Rahmani’s whole case rests on a hole that Ngannou already patched, in public, in a title fight.
Then there’s the part of the equation he didn’t mention at all: getting to the clinch in one piece. Kamaru Usman, talking about the division on his “Pound 4 Pound” podcast with Henry Cejudo this week, put it plainly: “as far as power, Francis Ngannou is probably the most dangerous heavyweight we’ve ever seen.” Bloody Elbow’s writeup on Rahmani makes the same point about how many big names Ngannou has put to sleep. Wrestling credentials mean a lot when you’ve got your arms around a man’s hips. They mean very little in the half second before that, when you’re changing levels in front of the heaviest hands in the sport’s history. Translating freestyle success into MMA success is a different job, and the entry is where that job gets hardest.
Ngannou’s most recent outing was a finish of Philipe Lins on Netflix in May. His next fight isn’t confirmed. Nobody has booked this, nobody has floated it as a real negotiation in the sources, and Rahmani is talking about a man who isn’t on his schedule.
Oleg Popov is the actual test
What is on his schedule is a problem. Rahmani fights Oleg Popov, the 2025 PFL Heavyweight Tournament Champion, at PFL Dubai on Saturday, November 14 at the Coca Cola Arena. The PFL posted on X that things have already heated up between the two before fight week, so nobody involved is treating this as a soft test for the prospect.
This is the fight that decides whether the Ngannou talk is fun trash talk or a legitimate callout. Six wins builds a record. Beating the reigning tournament winner builds a case. If Rahmani drags Popov down and finishes him the way he’s finished four of his six opponents, I’ll happily write the column arguing he’s earned a big name. If Popov keeps it standing and makes him eat shots on the way in, we get a preview of exactly why the Ngannou fantasy is a fantasy.
View post on X
Age cuts against waiting around, too. Rahmani is 34, so he doesn’t have the luxury of a slow, careful build. I get why he’s swinging for the biggest name he can think of. Attention is a currency in this sport, and saying Ngannou’s countrymen will need to rescue him is a quote that travels.
My take: Rahmani is the most interesting heavyweight prospect PFL has, and he’s chasing the wrong headline. The style matchup he’s selling depends on a Ngannou who stopped existing around the Gane fight. Beat Popov in Dubai, do it on top the way he promises, and then the conversation about levels gets a lot more interesting.
The same night, Gane defends the UFC heavyweight title against Josh Hokit at Madison Square Garden. November 14 is going to tell us a lot about big men who wrestle.
