From the colossal Jon Jones fight that never was to the disappointing ending of Tom Aspinall vs. Ciryl Gane, 2025 may have been the most frustrating year in UFC heavyweight history.
This time of year, everyone gets around to compiling their best-of lists. It’s inevitable. Best fight. Best fighter. Best knockout brought to you by a frozen pizza sponsor or whatever. Sometimes these are difficult lists to come up with only because there are so many deserving candidates.
But this year, there’s one very easy category. Just ask yourself: Which weight class had the absolute worst year? I’m talking about a dumpster fire of a year. An absolute dog poop kind of year. A year we’d all probably prefer to forget, but are nonetheless forced to remember.
The answer is obvious, isn’t it? It’s heavyweight. The division way over there on the far end of the weight spectrum. The weight class that’s supposed to be responsible for giving us the baddest man on the planet instead gave us a year of disappointment and despair.
Think about where we were at the start of 2025. Jon Jones had just defended the UFC heavyweight title against former champ Stipe Miocic near the end of 2024. The belt seemed as if it might be in the beginning stages of a full rehabilitation following the UFC exit of Francis Ngannou, the man who’s still MMA's lineal heavyweight champion.
All we needed was one fight to get the division back on track, and UFC CEO Dana White swore he’d give it to us. At one point he said it was 100% certain that we’d get Jones vs. Aspinall for the UFC heavyweight title.
“I think it’s probably the biggest fight in heavyweight history,” White told reporters at the end of 2024. “And it’s a massive fight in the history of the company, too,”
It’s also pure fantasy at this point. The monster fight that wasn’t. The unfulfilled promise of the year. What a letdown.
Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if we hadn’t spent the first half of 2025 being reassured, over and over again, that this fight would happen. Even as, in public, Jones kept side-stepping the matchup, UFC executives like White kept insisting all would work out in the end. And it almost did. Jones is said to have requested some extra millions tacked on to his usual fee in order to make the fight happen. With the help of Saudi oil money, the UFC is said to have added those millions. ($30 million to be exact, as reported by Uncrowned's own Ariel Helwani.) Then, his demands met, Jones about-faced and retired from the entire damn sport instead.
Talk about a heavyweight letdown. All that build-up. All those promises and guarantees. All for nothing.
So fine, we moved on. How about a consolation prize? We’d do Aspinall vs. Ciryl Gane instead. It wasn’t the fight anyone had been asking for, but it was certainly a fight that could be made, so it was. And for all of about four minutes at UFC 321 in October, it looked like it might actually be a good one. Then Gane went and treated Aspinall’s whole skull like a bowling ball, giving him the full "Three Stooges" treatment in both eyes, and that was that.
A no-contest finish to the year’s only UFC heavyweight title fight. Can you even imagine? For as bad as the years of Tim Sylvia vs. Andrei Arlovski over and over again were, at least they saw it through to the end. This was a backup plan that no one wanted and in the end we didn’t even get that. It felt like someone turned out the lights and hung a great, big sign on the UFC heavyweight division: Closed For Repairs.
But wait a minute, you might be saying, the UFC isn’t the only MMA promotion that features heavyweights. Maybe things went better for the big men elsewhere?
Nope, they sure didn’t. Ngannou, who won some version of the PFL’s confusingly-named titles back in 2024, didn’t fight at all in 2025. PFL finally got around to creating a new heavyweight title by the end of year, which former light heavyweight Vadim Nemkov won. The fact that he beat Renan Ferreira, who was last seen getting pummeled into a dreamless sleep by Ngannou, didn’t exactly give the whole affair a "baddest man on the planet" vibe. Instead it felt like backup plans and consolation prizes had become the trend even outside the UFC.
There was one bright spot, though. Only one, but still. Waldo Cortes-Acosta. In 2025 he emerged as the lone pirate roaming the heavyweight waters, always ready to say damn the maneuvers and head directly toward any challenge.
Cortes-Acosta fought five times in 2025, an absolutely scorching pace for a heavyweight. He won four of those, including a weird one against Ante Delija that saw him nearly stopped by an illegal eye-poke only to come back and win by TKO almost as soon as the fight was restarted. If that wasn’t pleasing enough for you, he came back later that same month to beat Shamil Gaziev in enemy territory on short notice.
That right there essentially made Cortes-Acosta heavyweight's fighter of the year. No one else in the top 10 of the UFC heavyweight division fought more than twice this year. Of the five fighters ahead of Cortes Acosta on the list, including the champ Aspinall, only Sergei Pavlovich fought more than once in 2025.
Activity is always issue with the big fellas. In 2025, the UFC put on just 34 heavyweight bouts across 42 total events. Many’s the time we went two or three or even four events in a row without a single heavyweight fight. Just in terms of output, it’s the most anemic weight class in the entire sport. And yet it still holds this strange grip on our imaginations. As many times as we’ve been burnt by heavyweight MMA, we never fully lose interest.
Here’s to a better heavyweight year in 2026. One hates to imagine how it could possibly get worse.
Category: General Sports
