Ali Abdelaziz couldn’t sit on it. On Monday afternoon he posted to X that Real American Freestyle had “Just signed one of the most infamous fighters in UFC History, stay tuned. Big news coming soon,” tagging RAF’s Chad Bronstein and Lance Palmer. A few hours later Mike Bohn of MMA Junkie had the name. Zabit Magomedsharipov, 35 years old, has signed a four-match deal with RAF and will debut on the promotion’s Nov. 14 card in Abu Dhabi against an opponent nobody has named yet.
The first reaction I saw from a lot of fans was a kind of polite disappointment, as if the news had arrived in the wrong envelope. They wanted the cage. I understand why. But I think the people grumbling have this backwards, and I want to make the case that this is a good, fitting place for Zabit to be.
The what-if that never closed
Start with the record, because it explains the ache. Magomedsharipov fought in the UFC from 2017 to 2019, went 6-0 there, and left the sport at 18-1. His name still comes up near the top of every bar argument about the biggest what-ifs in MMA. He never got the title shot, and he never got the long decline either. He simply stopped, and the space where his prime should have been has stayed empty ever since.
View post on X
Why he stopped has never been fully clear. He has pointed to health issues and to other opportunities outside the sport. I’m not going to pretend I know more than that, and I’d be wary of anyone who claims he left because he looked at the UFC and decided it was beneath him. The honest version is smaller and more human. A man with a body and a life of his own made a decision, and for years the rest of us treated that decision as a loss we were owed an explanation for.
So when that same man chooses to compete again, on his own terms, in a format he picked, I don’t read it as settling. I read it as him answering the question in the only way he cares to.
The counterargument, and why it doesn’t hold
The best case against my position goes like this: grappling is a fraction of what made Zabit special, and four wrestling matches at 35 are a consolation prize for fans who wanted to watch one of the most creative strikers of his generation fight again.
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That argument assumes the fight was the only thing worth having. It wasn’t for me. What made Zabit thrilling was the way he moved, the sense that he could flow from a kick into a scramble into a position you didn’t see coming. A lot of that lives in the grappling, and the grappling is what we get to keep. MMA Junkie’s piece made the point with a wink, noting that we may never see the spinning back kicks again but could still get a jumping leg sweep or two. That’s a smaller window into the same house. I’ll take it.
And he isn’t arriving cold. He’s been competing in grappling sparingly in recent years, and in August he beat Youssef Zalal by unanimous decision at ACBJJ 22. Zalal is a working UFC featherweight. That result should quiet anyone who assumes this is a nostalgia booking for a man who’s been sitting on a couch.
Why wrestling fits him
I’ve spent a lot of time writing about Dagestani wrestling, and I’m careful about turning a whole region into a mascot. Not every fighter from Dagestan is a wrestler at heart, and plenty of them love MMA without reservation. But there is a gym culture there that treats grappling as a lifelong practice, something you return to after the fighting is done, rather than one ingredient in a combat sport. A man going back to it at 35 sits comfortably inside that tradition. It doesn’t need to be framed as a retreat.
There’s also something clarifying about the format. A wrestling match strips away a lot of the packaging. Nobody is selling a pay-per-view off a press conference shoving match. You see who can hold position and who can’t. For a competitor whose reputation was always built on craft, that is a fair room to walk into.
View post on X
What RAF gets out of it
Nolan King’s reaction on X was four words: “RAF has regained the plot.” That’s the promotion’s half of the deal, and it’s a real one. A name like Zabit’s travels well beyond wrestling diehards, and a four-match commitment means RAF gets to build something with him over time. Abdelaziz calling him “infamous” was an odd word choice, but the instinct behind it is right. People will tune in for him who have never watched a freestyle card.
What I’ll be watching for is the opponent. RAF has five weeks to name someone, and the choice will tell us whether the promotion sees Zabit as a headliner to protect or a competitor to test. I hope it’s the second. He beat Zalal in August. Give him somebody who makes him work on Nov. 14 in Abu Dhabi.
