Tickets for UFC Saudi Arabia are officially on sale. Turki Alalshikh announced it on X Friday morning, first in Arabic and then in English three minutes later, confirming former middleweight champion Israel Adesanya against Sharabutdin “Shara Bullet” Magomedov as the headliner. The UFC followed with its own post billing the card as an “ALL-ACTION BLOCKBUSTER” and pushing fans toward the box office under the #UFCSaudiArabia and #RiyadhSeason tags.
The event is set for December 5 in Riyadh. Alalshikh’s posts list the location as The Venue, while an MMA Fighting report earlier this week placed it at ANB Arena. Beyond the main event, Alalshikh promised “more exciting MMA matchups on the card” but didn’t name any of them, so for now this is a one-fight sell.
That fight carries real weight for Adesanya. The two-time middleweight champion has lost four straight, a slide that runs back to the night Alex Pereira took his belt at Madison Square Garden. It’s a strange sentence to type about a man whose résumé includes two title wins over Robert Whittaker, a decision over Yoel Romero, and a fight with Anderson Silva, the fighter he once wanted to emulate.
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Whittaker, who spent 2019 through 2022 as Adesanya’s rival and has since become a friend and occasional training partner, was blunt about his nerves on the MMArcade podcast. “I don’t like this. I don’t like it,” he said.
His concern comes down to focus more than skill. Whittaker pointed to Adesanya’s loss to Imavov, where he felt Adesanya started sharp and then let the thread slip. “Like Imavov, he started so well. I can’t help but feel he didn’t sustain that vision; he didn’t sustain the focus for the entire fight,” Whittaker said.
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He also made the case for why this specific matchup suits Adesanya. Whittaker expects Magomedov to keep it standing, repeating “Shara’s not going for a takedown” twice in the same breath, and he believes that in a pure kickboxing exchange Adesanya’s tools are still elite. “I think the real fight here is Israel vs. himself,” Whittaker said. “I want to see Izzy come in the way Izzy of old [did]; his head switched on, focused, laser-focused, and I think he beats the brakes off Shara, to be honest. Yeah, I have Israel all day.”
My take: Whittaker is the right person to listen to here, because he’s been on the receiving end of a locked-in Adesanya twice and knows exactly what that version costs an opponent. Four losses in a row is a real slide, and no ticket campaign changes that. But this is the most honest booking Adesanya could have asked for, a striker who won’t shoot, which removes the wrestling variable and leaves him with the question Whittaker keeps circling: can he stay present for 25 minutes? He’ll have the answer, one way or the other, on December 5 in Riyadh.
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