The UFC's Most Valuable Fighters

TKO has not been in the business of making MMA fighters into stars and it's starting to show.

Last week, Mike Bohn of MMA Junkie and Luke Thomas of Morning Kombat compared their lists of the UFC’s most valuable fighters.

What was most notable about the lists was not who was on it but who wasn’t on it and why.

Bohn defined the criteria as, “Who are the most important (fighters) who are making the company work? Who they can rely on. Who they can promote. If I was starting my own promotion who are the top fighters that I would pick to come along with me to build around?”

They tried to answer the question: which fighters offer TKO the most financial upside in the coming 5 years?

A company that primarily runs shows in North America is managing to make billions without few if any Americans, Canadians, or Mexican stars. Which is why this list experiment is so fascinating.

Here are their lists:

UFC’s most valuable fighters: Luke Thomas

1. Ilia Topuria, Featherweight Champion*
   28 years old, 16-0, Lightweight (just vacated the Featherweight title after 0 defenses), Spanish/Georgian

2. Khamzat Chimaev
   30 years old, 14-0, Middleweight (has also fought at Welterweight), Chechen/Russian

3. Islam Makachev, Lightweight Champion

   33 years old, 27-1, Lightweight, Dagestani/Russian

4. Shavkat Rakhmonov
   30 years old, 19-0, Welterweight, Kazakh

5. Arman Tsarukyan
   28 years old, 22-3, Lightweight, Armenian

6. Tom Aspinall, Interim Heavyweight Champion
   31 years old, 15-3, Heavyweight, English

7. Dricus du Plessis, Middleweight Champion
   31 years old, 23-2, Middleweight, South African

8. Ian Machado Garry
   27 years old, 16-1, Welterweight, Irish

9. Zhang Weili, Women’s Strawweight Champion
   35 years old, 26-3, Strawweight, Chinese

10. Umar Nurmagomedov

    29 years old, 18-1, Bantamweight, Dagestani/Russian

UFC’s most valuable fighters: Mike Bohn

1. Ilia Topuria, Featherweight Champion*
   28 years old, 16-0, Lightweight (just vacated the Featherweight title after 0 defenses), Spanish/Georgian

2. Islam Makachev, Lightweight Champion

   33 years old, 27-1, Lightweight, Dagestani/Russian

3. Tom Aspinall, Interim Heavyweight Champion
   31 years old, 15-3, Heavyweight, English

4. Alex Pereira
   37 years old, 14-2, Light Heavyweight, Brazilian

5. Max Holloway

   33 years old, 26-8, Featherweight/Lightweight, American/Hawaiian

6. Khamzat Chimaev
   30 years old, 14-0, Middleweight (has also fought at Welterweight), Chechen/Russian

7. Dricus du Plessis, Middleweight Champion
   31 years old, 23-2, Middleweight, South African

8. Sean O’Malley
   30 years old, 18-2-1, Bantamweight, American

9. Charles Oliveira
   35 years old, 35-10-1, Lightweight, Brazilian

10. Zhang Weili, Women’s Strawweight Champion
    35 years old, 26-3, Strawweight, Chinese

UFC’s top stars are old, small, and not American

No 10 media members would likely come up with the same lists as Thomas and Bohn. However, their lists provide a useful starting point for a discussion of the human resource assets of the UFC in 2025.

At a glance, several things leap out:

• They’re old
  Despite both writers making it a point to emphasize youth and future value to the organization, Thomas’ list features only four fighters in their 20s (and none under 27) and Bohn’s list features only one.

• They’re foreign
  Despite the UFC being an American-based promotion which holds the vast majority of its events in the U.S., Thomas features no Americans on his list and Bohn only one: Sean O’Malley.

• They’re small
  Both lists feature only one Heavyweight and only Bohn has room for a Light Heavyweight. Thomas’s list features four men fighting at Lightweight or under and Bohn’s features five.

• They’re men
  Despite women making up enough of the UFC roster to generate consistent fan complaints about too much WMMA in their UFC, only one female fighter made either list and she was the oldest athlete on either writer’s list.

But what about…?

Looking at the top 10 lists above, I’m sure many readers are asking themselves, “but where’s Jon Jones? Conor McGregor? Bo Nickal? Paddy Pemblett?” etc.

Bohn addressed those questions by building out a full top 30 most valuable fighters list. He helpfully added explanatory tiers which I’ll include. The section titles are Bohn’s the commentary following each group is mine.

“Little Time Left and On the Way Out”
30 Dustin Poirier
29 Kamaru Usman
28 Justin Gaethje

This group could potentially also include Michael Chandler. The title is self-descriptive and true. Poirier and Gaethje, along with Chandler and Eddie Alvarez (before he absconded to ONE FC), were key to many of the highlights of the UFC’s TKO era, but their time is passing fast.

“Could Be Big But Still Uncertain”
27 Paddy Pimblett
26 Bo Nickal

These two, along with Jack Della Maddalena, are fighters the UFC has high hopes for. They’re not quite in the Paige & Sage category, but they’ve yet to win the big fights that will put them over the top into stardom.

In my view, Pimblett, Nickal, and Della Maddalena are just a few steps behind Sean O’Malley and Ian Machado Garry and might very well achieve their potential. Therefore I would rank them considerably higher if I were to make such a list.

It’s also important to note that Nickal is one of the last examples of a breed that once dominated the UFC — accomplished collegiate wrestlers. A combination of USA Wrestling taking steps to improve pay and increase coaching job opportunities in the 2010s and the UFC’s now notoriously low pay scale and high risk of permanent injury has cut off the taps to this talent pipeline.

“Current Champions But Still of Use”
25 Valentina Shevchenko
24 Alejandro Pantojoa
23 Belal Muhammad
22 Merab Dvalishvili

Kind of a harsh title, but honest. These athletes have accomplished incredible things but have failed to connect with fans in a big way (Muhammad, Dvalishvili), or are competing at flyweights or in WMMA.

“Potential Future Champions With Upside”
21 Kayla Harrison
20 Shavkat Rakhmonov
19 Umar Nurmegomedov

Harrison’s biggest problem is a lack of credible opponents and a brutal weight cut to make 135 pounds. There’s also the harsh reality that she lacks Ronda Rousey or Gina Carano-style charisma.

Rakhmonov and Nurmegomedov are both in Thomas’ top 10, but I think Bohn’s lower placement is probably more accurate. My guess is that Luke is overrating them as potential draws based on their skills. He also seems to think that Kazakhstan and Central Asia represent a potential market for the UFC.

I’m sorry, this is a promotion that managed to piss away a hugely successful Canadian market, no longer has a media deal in Brazil, and still hasn’t figured out how to crack the European or African markets despite having had multiple popular champions from each region. The UFC will not be making money in Kazakhstan in our lifetimes.

“Ex-Champions Who Still Have Tread”
18 Brandon Moreno
17 Leon Edwards
16 Robert Whitaker
15 Sean Strickland
14 Israel Adesanya
13 Alexander Volkanovski

It must sting to be put in this category, but the harsh reality is these fighters have probably peaked in the sport and promotion. That’s the problem with making it to the top, there’s nowhere to go but down.

Except for Israel Adesanya and Strickland, none of these ex-champs became stars or major draws even at their peaks.

And even Adesanya never quite reached his full potential after an ill-fated attempt to move up and challenge for the Light Heavyweight title.

As for Strickland, he managed to parlay a kind of Colby Covington 2.0 appeal to the worst instincts of the UFC fan base into a flirtation with popular success that was undone by a short title reign and, frankly, a pretty dull fighting style.

“I Guess So”
12 Conor McGregor
11 Jon Jones

And now we come to the two biggest names still associated with the fighting promotion. Unfortunately, both McGregor and Jones have worked very hard to damage their own reputations through appalling and criminal behavior.

And as Luke Thomas points out, both men are likely to never fight for the UFC again or just fight one more time.

There have been many rumors that the UFC teased and delayed McGregor’s return to fighting in 2023 and 2024 in an attempt to save him for their new media deal. Unfortunately, McGregor’s courtroom battles and increasingly awful behavior have made him less and less appealing to any major corporation looking to maximize profits and minimize headaches.

Only Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro Could Get $1B/Year With This Roster

This brings us back to one of our perpetual topics: how on Earth is the UFC breaking revenue and profit records with this lineup?

There’s a simple answer.

Endeavor and TKO are managed by the kings of value extraction who have mastered being on every side of every deal.

UFC is benefiting from playing a negotiating game of being the “world’s tallest midget.” They’re playing off of the fear of streamers losing money or M & A fears that they’ll get swallowed up by bigger fish.

What happens when market consolidation is completed and the musical chairs on the deck are filled?

This is the problem PFL is about to encounter in their quest to receive a significant fraction of what TKO will get for the UFC’s ultimate media rights from the second-place streamer.

The synergy they get from combining effective monopolies over mixed martial arts and professional wrestling with an utterly dominant position in talent representation (remember they don’t just rep actors and directors, they also represent a plurality of the talking heads and most popular influencers we see on our screens) allows Ari and Mark to milk a clearly declining product for ever-increasing amounts of cash.

This is very much their “mile wide, inch deep” strategy. Just play a volume game.

High volume number of shows. High volume roster. Volume audience that plays the percentages by grabbing a few bucks from a ton of people from brand awareness and then really extracting cash from the diehards by making them pay more and more for what they used to get.

A huge help is the reality that Ari and Mark are not dealing with knowledgeable fight fans like Luke Thomas and Mike Bohn when they negotiate the media rights and site fee deals that fuel their empire. They are dealing with clueless media executives and government officials who wouldn’t know Jack Della Maddalena from Cactus Jack.

As for the incredible live gates they’ve been posting ($3.8M for Cejudo vs Song in Seattle?!?) that’s due to higher ticket prices and the fact that they spent two years hiding out on Fight Island and the Apex.

As Zach Arnold has been reminding readers of The MMA Draw, fans don’t matter anymore.

These Lists Reveal What TKO Is NOT Doing

It’s clear to long-time fans that the UFC roster of 2025 is a pale imitation of the UFC roster of 2016, when Endeavor bought the promotion from Zuffa.

These lists are proof that, despite much-discussed investments in UFC Performance Institutes in Las Vegas, Shanghai, and Mexico City, the promotion has failed to develop talent in key markets in any systematic way.

Why do more UFC fighters emerge from the slopfest that is Dana White’s Contender Series than from the UFC PI’s?

Why are there only 30 heavyweights on the entire UFC roster when, Turki Alalshikh’s remarkable success in boxing comes almost entirely from the big-name (if not big profit) heavyweight bouts he has managed to book?

Fans want to see heavyweights and light heavyweights. In the 2000s, these were the marquee divisions of PRIDE FC and the UFC, respectively.

This is all a painful reminder that the fight circus is not being run by fight people. It’s being run by Hollywood people — and not movie people, mind you, dealmakers, not filmmakers.

Ari Emanuel and Mark Shapiro are looking to get the maximum amount of cash while paying out the minimum amount of cash.

The fact that the sport is not on track to produce a new Brock Lesnar, Fedor Emelianenko, Jon Jones, or Chuck Liddell in the next decade is seemingly of no concern to the people in charge.

Nate Wilcox is Editor-in-Chief of The MMA Draw newsletter on Substack.