Six Promotions, Twenty Weight Classes: Why MMA Champions Cannot Be Compared Directly

Sunday morning, a small coffee shop on the bank of the Han River. A young man taps the table and declares to his friend that Anatoly Malykhin — the ONE Championship middleweight champion — would knock out anyone in the UFC. He says it firmly, eyes bright. He does not know one seemingly small thing: the "middleweight" belt he is talking about weighs 205 pounds. The UFC's middleweight is only 185.

I sat there, my iced coffee with condensed milk slowly melting in the Da Nang morning, listening to the argument run from lively to deadlocked. One man said Malykhin holds two belts, that is class. The other shot back: the UFC is the summit, everyone else is a feeder. Neither was wrong in his own mind. They were simply talking about two different things using the same name.

Twenty-five years covering martial arts, from small shows in my native Australia to big arenas in Russia, Thailand and Vietnam, I have sat through countless mornings like that. The more I hear fans argue, the more I notice something few pay attention to: the global map of champions is swelling faster than our ability to understand it.

That map spreads out like this. UFC, ONE Championship, PFL, Rizin, Invicta FC — five major promotions, plus the ghost of Bellator already dissolving into the PFL. Stretching from the 265-pound heavyweight division down to the 108-pound atomweight, men and women, more than twenty weight classes in all, more than fifty men's championship belts on their own.

In the UFC there is Islam Makhachev at lightweight, Alexander Volkanovski at featherweight, Carlos Ulberg at light heavyweight. The heavyweight belt and the women's flyweight belt are vacant. In the PFL, Vadim Nemkov holds heavyweight, Corey Anderson light heavyweight, Usman Nurmagomedov lightweight, Cris Cyborg women's featherweight — six belts spread across men's and women's divisions, a sign that this promotion is gathering a great deal of talent.

At ONE, beyond Malykhin there is Christian Lee — who holds two belts at once — and Xiong Jing Nan in women's strawweight. Rizin, the Japanese-rooted promotion, is lighter, with titles at lightweight, featherweight and bantamweight, and one vacant light heavyweight seat. Invicta, the women-only promotion, has Jennifer Maia — a former UFC title challenger — alongside Ferreira at atomweight, but leaves four divisions vacant.

What stands out is that each promotion defines "heavyweight" and "middleweight" its own way. UFC and PFL use the familiar ladder. ONE uses a very different one, and that difference is the core of every misunderstanding. The list is long, but the list alone tells no story. The story lies in the gaps and in the connections between the names.

There is one fact most misunderstood in this entire picture, and it sits in the weight ladder. ONE Championship's weight ladder is shifted up exactly one tier relative to the UFC and PFL. ONE's middleweight is 205 pounds — the number the UFC calls light heavyweight. ONE's light heavyweight is 225 pounds, far beyond the UFC's 205-pound light heavyweight. ONE's welterweight is 185 pounds, exactly the UFC's middleweight. And so on, one tier down at a time.

Which means when a fan says "the ONE middleweight champion versus the UFC middleweight champion," they are placing side by side two fighters about twenty pounds apart — a gap large enough to decide the outcome. No one is at fault here. ONE chose a heavier ladder on purpose, helping Asia-Pacific fighters, with larger frames in some markets, reach the top without cutting to the point of collapse.

I once watched a weigh-in at a small show. The rasping breath in the sauna room, the glazed eyes of a young fighter as he stepped on the scale. He did not lose to an opponent — he lost to his own body. So when I look at ONE's heavier ladder, I see a health-protective design, even if almost nobody calls it that.

The consequence is a barrier to movement. A ONE middleweight champion, if he moved to the UFC, would almost certainly have to drop to light heavyweight — shedding nearly twenty pounds just to be "in the right class." The body does not change, but the class name does. This is the structural wall few mention when they dream of cross-promotional superfights.

Then there is the PFL story. PFL is becoming the second-tier talent aggregator of global MMA. Look at its champion roster — Nemkov, Anderson, Nurmagomedov, Cyborg — almost all bearing Bellator roots or UFC careers past. A few years ago Bellator collapsed, and the PFL absorbed most of its stars. That was a commercial gamble: buying second-tier star power to build weight against the UFC.

At ONE, a fighter can hold two belts at once — Malykhin at light heavyweight and middleweight, Lee at welterweight and lightweight. That is a clever marketing tool: a "champion versus champion" bout always sells better than an ordinary title fight. The UFC is stricter, so each year ONE can stage more big nights.

And then the vacancies. Seven belts sit unfilled — UFC heavyweight, UFC women's flyweight, Rizin light heavyweight, and four Invicta women's divisions. Five of the seven are in women's and lighter men's classes, suggesting those divisions turn over more slowly, or are waiting for something that has not yet arrived. Some fights last twenty-five minutes, but their story lingers for decades.

The fans in that coffee shop, like millions of other viewers, carried a hidden assumption: that the word "champion" is a common currency, exchangeable at any promotion. That assumption is wrong.

An MMA championship belt today is closer to a dialect than to a common language. Each promotion speaks its own vernacular — its own weight ladder, its own rules, its own scoring. Sitting in the stands in Moscow in 2026, I learned to listen with my eyes and see with my ears, and that lesson holds here too: the same name, "middleweight," but two different bodies, two different worlds.

More than fifty men's championship belts exist at the same time. That cheapens the word "champion." When everyone is a champion, being champion still carries a little glow, but it no longer means "the best in the world." And the cross-promotional superfights fans long for remain a contractual fantasy, because exclusive contracts bind each fighter to a single promotion.

Fans say: "Let them fight each other." But the promotions do not share a definition of fair. One promotion is twenty pounds heavier. Another pays by season, another pays flat fees, another is bound tightly to the Asian market. Power lies where the crowd forgets: whoever defines the weight class defines the champion.

One thing I find more striking than all the rest. Invicta — the women's promotion — is quietly catching the women's fighters the UFC lets go. Jennifer Maia, a former UFC title challenger, now holds a belt there. This is a safety valve for the women's labor market, something nobody talks about but which matters enormously. When you see a former champion still fighting, sometimes it is an entire system keeping someone from being left behind.

That evening, the young man in the coffee shop still refused to concede the argument. I did not join in. I only kept thinking one thought: ten years from now, will MMA fans still ask each other "who is the real champion"? Or will they have learned that each promotion is a land, each weight class a border, and each belt a separate story that can only be read where it was born.

I will be watching one thing: whether the UFC ever agrees to let its champion step into another promotion. Until then, the belt remains a beautiful promise — made to one house, not yet to the whole world.