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Jeff Wagenheim, ESPN
Two of the PFL’s best fighters will look to establish themselves as being worthy of a place in the top tier of mixed martial arts Saturday. So will the fight company itself.
Renan Ferreira won the 2023 PFL heavyweight championship last November, and on the same night, women’s featherweight Larissa Pacheco captured her second straight season title. Those accomplishments brought with them hefty paydays and a degree of recognition, but nothing like what will shine on whichever of the two fighters is victorious at PFL Super Fights: Battle of the Giants in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (ESPN+ PPV at 4 p.m. ET, prelims on ESPN+ at 1:30 p.m.).
Ferreira faces former UFC heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou, who will be making his long-anticipated PFL debut after signing with the company in May 2023. He took a two-fight detour into boxing during which he knocked down and nearly defeated that sport’s top heavyweight at the time, Tyson Fury. The last time we saw Ngannou in an MMA cage, in January 2022, he was solidifying his standing as the baddest man on the planet. That status wouldn’t necessarily transfer to Ferreira with a victory in this weekend’s main event, but he would get a supercharged boost in that direction.
Likewise, Pacheco would elevate her profile in a big way by beating Cris Cyborg, a longtime A-lister of women’s MMA. Pacheco already has an elite entry on her resume, as she handed Kayla Harrison — the presumptive next challenger for the UFC women’s bantamweight championship — the only defeat of her career in the 2022 PFL lightweight final. Adding a win over Cyborg, the reigning Bellator champion and a former champ in the UFC, Strikeforce and Invicta, would be a potent one-two punch for Pacheco.
These two fights also represent a golden opportunity for the PFL, which has struggled to establish a foothold in the MMA landscape even after purchasing the sport’s No. 2 promotion, Bellator, nearly a year ago. Victories by Ngannou and Cyborg would signal that recent acquisitions have enhanced the PFL roster. Wins by Ferreira and Pacheco would make a bold proclamation about the quality of what the PFL already had.
These two fights are the most appealing of the 10 set to play out at The Mayadeen in Riyadh. But there’s also a Bellator title bout, a fight featuring a former champ and more. Here’s a ranking of the top five matchups at PFL Super Fights.
1. Heavyweight: Francis Ngannou vs. Renan Ferreira
Ngannou once reigned with an iron fist as a UFC heavyweight, knocking out 10 of his 14 opponents, including a run of four straight KOs in fights that lasted barely a minute. Ferreira also is a ferocious knockout artist, with 11 among his 13 career victories. The past four of them won him last year’s PFL heavyweight title and then, in 21 seconds, annihilated Bellator champ Ryan Bader. But while the Bader win is by far the best of Ferreira’s career, Ngannou’s list of conquests includes four UFC champions — including the consensus greatest heavyweight ever, Stipe Miocic. Ferreira has some catching up to do, but a victory Saturday would be a huge first step. And with Ngannou having been out of the sport for nearly three years, this is the time to catch him flat and further flatten him.
2. Women’s featherweight: Cris Cyborg vs. Larissa Pacheco
This fight is so much more than a fight. It is a measuring stick, determining whether Pacheco has reached an elite level. It is a clock, telling us whether 2024 is still Cyborg’s time. At age 39, Cyborg might not have many more fights in her. And yet, she has not shown urgency to step up her activity in her final years as an MMA fighter, competing just twice since the start of 2022. Pacheco, meanwhile, has crammed eight fights into that same amount of time — even while taking off most of the past year. Pacheco, who just turned 30, has a starry future ahead if she can become just the second fighter in two decades to beat the legendary Cyborg. The other? The GOAT, Amanda Nunes.
3. Lightweight: AJ McKee vs. Paul Hughes
The two fights ranked above should come as no surprise. They’re the main and co-main events, both clashes of champions. This ranking, on the other hand, might be more of an eye-opener, since it stacks a nontitle fight ahead of a title bout involving an undefeated champion. But this matchup of one-loss fighters is a more intriguing draw, particularly because of McKee. When he took the Bellator featherweight championship from that company’s greatest, Patricio “Pitbull” Freire, back in 2021, it seemed the sky was the limit. But McKee’s reign was brief, and soon after he moved to lightweight. McKee has shown flashes of brilliance at 155 pounds but has mostly been slowed by injury and the overall lethargy of the Bellator promotion. Can he jump-start his career under the pay-per-view spotlight?
4. Middleweight: Johnny Eblen vs. Fabian Edwards
OK, so why did this fight for the Bellator championship end up down here? Because we’ve seen it before, and we don’t even need a long memory to picture how it went. Just a year ago, Eblen defended the title against Edwards in a KO win. After two uneventful rounds, Eblen dropped Edwards with a right hand 10 seconds into Round 3 and swarmed for the finish. Edwards wasn’t dominated, and he even opened a cut on the champ’s face. And the 15-0 Eblen is among the best in the world and always worth watching. But do we need to see this one run back?
5. Middleweight: Mostafa Nada vs. Ahmed Sami
This is the way to get the Riyadh crowd involved during the prelims: Put a couple of the region’s fighters into the cage early in the night. Nada, who is from the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah, brings with him crowd-pleasing power, as six of his nine career wins have come by knockout. His opponent, Sami, is from neighboring Egypt and is also a finisher, with five KOs and three submissions among his 11 wins. This matchup should inject some local-pride energy into the arena from the get-go.