Makhachev Passes Anderson Silva, and the Number Paramount Won't Release

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Boxing · MMA · The Stories Behind The Sport

AUGUST 17, 2026

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MAKHACHEV PASSES ANDERSON SILVA, HOLDS OFF GARRY TO KEEP WELTERWEIGHT TITLE

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Carlos Prates is the strong favorite to get the next crack at Makhachev's welterweight title ahead of Michael Morales. Makhachev said as much after UFC 330, arguing Prates has done more to earn it, and Prates himself is telling anyone who asks that he will not take a stay-busy fight first. Morales served as the backup for UFC 330 and believes that entitles him to the shot, which produced a cageside argument between the two during the event. When a champion publicly names his preference, matchmaking usually follows.

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New IBF middleweight champion Aaron McKenna wants Hamzah Sheeraz next, and he has been saying so publicly for months. The complication is weight: McKenna has called for the fight at super middleweight, which would mean vacating or risking the belt he just won in Dublin. McKenna fights under the Zuffa Boxing banner, so TKO controls whether this gets made rather than any of boxing's traditional promoters, and TKO has shown it likes marquee names on its cards. Timing is the open question, not appetite.

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Zuffa Boxing is expected to add dates to its 2026 calendar beyond the schedule it originally published, with people around the promotion pointing to as many as 16 events and a wider international footprint. The Dublin card in August was the tenth of the year and drew well in a market TKO had not touched before. Nothing has been formally announced, and the promotion has been careful not to commit to a number in public.

Rolando Romero vs. Teofimo Lopez Jr. (August 22)

Romero (17-2, 13 KOs) makes the first defense of the WBA welterweight title against Teofimo Lopez (22-2, 13 KOs) at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, on a PBC pay-per-view carried by DAZN and Prime Video. Romero won the belt in its regular form by upsetting Ryan Garcia at Times Square in May 2025 and was elevated to full champion on August 1 after Jaron Ennis vacated to move up to 154. Lopez has held titles at lightweight and junior welterweight, so a win here makes him a three-division champion. Lopez is the better boxer by a wide margin. Romero is the one who keeps getting written off and keeps not going away, and he only needs to land once.

Mikaela Mayer vs. Chantelle Cameron (August 29)

A junior middleweight unification at bp pulse LIVE Arena in Birmingham, England, headlining an all-female MVP card on which every main-card bout pits a British fighter against an American. Cameron (22-1, 8 KOs), the former undisputed junior welterweight champion, brings pressure and physical strength. Mayer (22-2, 5 KOs) brings the jab, the volume and the better engine. Mayer has already called it the female fight of the year, which is the sort of thing fighters say and, in this case, might be right. Caroline Dubois against Amelia Moore supports. Sky Sports in the UK, ESPN+ in the States.

Umar Nurmagomedov vs. Song Yadong (August 29)

The UFC returns to Shanghai with the third-ranked bantamweight against the fifth. Nurmagomedov (20-1, 7-1 UFC) is the more complete fighter and by some distance the better grappler, though the aura of invincibility went with his loss to Merab Dvalishvili. Song (23-9-1, 12-4-1 UFC) has the crisper hands and the home crowd at Shanghai Oriental Sports Center. With Petr Yan holding the belt and the division reshuffling behind him, the winner is realistically one fight from a title shot. The UFC is leaning on Song's drawing power in China to make this Fight Night matter internationally.

UFC 330 was the first superfight-scale main event to land in the back half of the Paramount era, and as of this writing neither the promotion nor the network has released an audience figure for it. That silence is the story. Under the seven-year, $7.7 billion deal that took effect in January, there is no buyrate to leak and no per-event revenue line to brag about. There is only reach, and reach gets disclosed when it flatters you.

The benchmarks are already on the board. UFC 324 set streaming records for Paramount+ when it opened the deal on January 24. UFC 329 reached roughly 15.9 million viewers across the United States and Latin America and peaked at 8.3 million concurrent streams, which Paramount called the most-streamed exclusive live event in the service's history. Freedom 250 at the White House averaged about 7 million U.S. viewers and reached 17 million in total. Those are broadcast-scale numbers the old model, at roughly $80 a card, could never have produced.

What none of it settles is whether the audience converts. A pay-per-view buy was a hard number attached to a credit card. A stream inside a $12.99 subscription is an engagement metric, and engagement metrics are worth exactly what retention says they are worth. TKO reported second-quarter revenue up 18 percent to $1.5 billion in early August and raised full-year guidance, so the money is arriving on schedule. It arrives whether 3 million people watch or 16 million do, which is the entire point of the deal and also the reason these viewership figures have become a branding exercise rather than a business one.

Boxing is running the control experiment in real time. Six days after Makhachev fought for free to anyone with a Paramount+ login, Romero and Lopez fight for the WBA welterweight title on a pay-per-view. The sport still needs the per-event premium to finance its purses, and it is now asking fans to pay for a single card in a market where the biggest promotion in combat sports has stopped asking. The size of that gap is the most important number in the industry, and nobody has published it either.

Ian Machado Garry started his professional career 15-0 and won his first eight UFC fights on the strength of a long, slick, range-managing striking game and a self-belief that made him must-watch whether you liked him or not. Shavkat Rakhmonov ended the undefeated run over five rounds at UFC 310 in December 2024. What Garry did next was the interesting part: he beat Belal Muhammad and Carlos Prates back to back, a harder two-fight stretch than most contenders survive, and it bought him the title shot.

Saturday cost him that shot and left him 17-2. It was not the beating the first two rounds threatened to become. He was dropped by a head kick in the second and looked headed for a long night, then adjusted, went to the body, and made the back half genuinely difficult for a man who had won 16 in a row without much argument. One judge gave him a round. Against this champion, that is not nothing.

The criticism he took afterward was not about skill. Dana White's complaint was that Garry opened the fifth round of a world title fight he was losing by shaking hands and hugging rather than throwing, and that the body work he had been landing deserved a closer. Fighters get remembered for those five minutes. Garry, at 28 and still one of the more marketable names at 170, can afford one such night but probably not two.

The rebuild is straightforward if the UFC is patient. Give him a top-ten striker, let him fight going forward instead of backward, and let him remind people what the hype was about. Someone like Geoff Neal makes sense competitively and commercially. What he cannot afford is another five-round chess match with an elite grappler before he has answered the question Rakhmonov asked and Makhachev asked again: what happens when he has to win a fight he is losing.