Sean Strickland is openly wondering whether he wants to stay in the UFC. The middleweight champion wrote on X this week that he’s running out of patience with the promotion over money, and he laid out an exit plan that runs through light heavyweight and ends with Jake Paul.
“I gotta be honest, unless things change with the UFC, I’m kinda over it,” Strickland posted.
Then he kept typing. “[Conor] McGregor makes 30 million to fight for 30 seconds and they don’t want to pay us a fraction of it,” he wrote. “Contemplating just going to 205 [light heavyweight], knocking out my contract and scrapping with Jake Paul. That sounds fun.”
The posts came days after the UFC announced Charles Oliveira vs. Diego Lopes as the main event of UFC 335, the final numbered card of 2026. Strickland had said he’d fight again before the year was out, and December had been the consistent target for his return. Instead, he says he isn’t on UFC 335 because he and the promotion couldn’t agree on pay.
Bloody Elbow, citing reports, wrote that the UFC went with a different title fight for December even though Strickland was available and ready to go. So the company had its middleweight champion raising his hand for the last big card of the year and booked around him.
The money gripe keeps growing
Strickland has been loud about his pay for a while now, and nothing in the past week has calmed him down. Nassourdine Imavov even offered to pay Strickland himself, per Bloody Elbow. That gesture apparently didn’t move the needle.
The sharpest line came in a reply. A fan backed Strickland on X by running down everything he’s already done inside the Octagon, and Strickland answered: “Yep, and they both made significantly more than me.”
He appeared to be talking about Israel Adesanya and Khamzat Chimaev, the two champions he beat on his way to the middleweight title. That’s a champion telling you the guys he beat out-earned him, which is an awkward thing for any promotion to have floating around in public.
The Jake Paul part is where you squint. Strickland’s plan, as he described it, is to move up to 205, fight out the remaining bouts on his UFC deal, and then go take the kind of payday that McGregor-sized names get outside the Octagon. He framed it as contemplation, not a decision, and he hasn’t said how many fights are left on his contract.
Quick take
I like a fighter who answers the question straight, and Strickland always does, sometimes to his own detriment. This time he’s got a point. A middleweight champion who was ready to fight in December is sitting at home while the year’s last numbered card goes out without him, and the stated reason is money. The Jake Paul talk reads like leverage to me, a guy putting a number on the table in public because the private talks went nowhere. Still, “knocking out my contract” is a phrase the UFC should take seriously, because champions who start counting fights don’t usually stop. For now, UFC 335 heads into December with Oliveira and Lopes on top, and the middleweight champ is posting about it on X.
