Alexander Volkanovski has an exit plan, and it involves taking the lightweight title off Justin Gaethje first.
Speaking on the Who The Fook Are These Guys? podcast, the UFC featherweight champion pitched a superfight against Gaethje with the explicit framing that both men would retire afterward.
“Let’s do a superfight, lightweight title on the line and then we can both retire,” Volkanovski said. “Then, straight after that, let the division sort themselves out. Let’s make that happen.”
The bracketed word in that first quote was inserted by the transcribing outlet, so treat the retirement phrasing as the reporter’s clarification of his meaning.
He Has to Beat Movsar Evloev First
None of this exists unless Volkanovski gets past Evloev at UFC 333 on October 24 in Abu Dhabi, and that is not a formality.
Evloev is 32 and 20-0 overall, 10-0 in the UFC, with every single UFC win coming by decision. He last fought in March at UFC Fight Night 270 in London, taking a majority decision over Lerone Murphy in a bout where he lost a point in the fourth round for an illegal groin strike and which 12 of 17 media scorecards had as a draw.
So Volkanovski is proposing a retirement tour before he fights an undefeated challenger who most observers thought should have drawn his last fight.
The Ages Are the Point
Volkanovski turned 38 in September. He is 28-4 with 13 knockouts, a two-time featherweight champion, and he last defended by unanimous decision over Diego Lopes at UFC 325 in February.
Gaethje is 37, born two months after Volkanovski, and sits at 28-5 with 21 knockouts. He won the interim lightweight title by unanimous decision over Paddy Pimblett at UFC 324 in January, then took the undisputed belt from Ilia Topuria by TKO at the end of the fourth round at UFC Freedom 250 on the White House lawn in June. That was Topuria’s first professional loss.
Two champions in their late thirties, 65 wins between them, both with nothing left to prove at their own weight. On paper it is the cleanest superfight the UFC could book.
Gaethje Has Not Said Yes to Anything
This is where it gets complicated. Gaethje has not committed to fighting again. Reporting has him undecided between a return and retirement, and if he does return, Arman Tsarukyan is the name most often floated for next year. That matchup is speculation rather than anything announced.
A man weighing retirement is not an obvious candidate to accept a fight whose explicit purpose is retirement, against a smaller champion moving up.
Volkanovski has done this before. He went up to lightweight to face Islam Makhachev twice, losing a close decision in the first and getting stopped in the short-notice rematch. He knows the weight class is bigger and he is older now than he was then.
Why It Would Sell
Because both men are finishers in reputation if not always in practice, because Gaethje does not have a boring fight in him, and because the premise of a mutual send-off gives a pay-per-view a story that does not require a division to be rearranged afterward.
It also solves a problem for the UFC. A champion who retires with the belt creates a vacancy and a mess. Two champions who agree to fight each other and then both walk away gives the promotion a clean reset at 145 and 155 on the same night.
The Realistic Read
Volkanovski is campaigning nine days before a title defense against an undefeated opponent, which is the oldest promotional move there is. It gets him asked about a superfight instead of about Evloev’s unbeaten record.
Beat Evloev and the conversation becomes real. Lose, and the retirement happens without the superfight attached.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.