Yaroslav Amosov will make his long-awaited UFC debut before the calendar year closes out and will take on one of the most prolific welterweights in the history of the organization. The former Bellator MMA welterweight champion will enter the octagon on December 13th, and Amosov will take on Neil Magny inside the UFC Apex.

This will be the final card the Ultimate Fighting Championship will promote for 2025 with reports of this bout initially coming out by way of Best Fight Picks. News of Amosov entering the UFC’s drug testing pool had made headlines in recent weeks, with breaking news of his debut seeming like an inevitability. The Ukrainian standout will test himself against someone with a myriad of records in the UFC at 170 pounds.

Magny is the winningest 170-pound fighter in UFC history, with additional UFC welterweight records set with most bouts as well as most fight time set for that weight category.

Yaroslav Amosov’s prolific road to the UFC

Yaroslav Amosov captured Bellator gold against Douglas Lima, and then, after a stint in the military serving his war-torn home country of Ukraine, he unified the titles with then-interim champ Logan Storley in Q1 of 2023.

In what is his lone professional MMA loss, Amosov lost his BMMA gold to Jason Jackson in what was the last official Bellator MMA card before PFL acquired them. Amosov floated around for a bit before a CFFC victory over ex-UFC vet Curtis Millender in Q1 of this year, eventually got him onto the radar of the UFC.

Magny has won back-to-back contests heading into this contest, with a lengthy company tenure, seeing him float in and out of the welterweight top fifteen since signing with the promotion over a decade ago. For Amosov’s debut, he will likely have to face the rhetoric that certain mixed martial arts fans get into when a former Bellator MMA standout steps into the UFC cage.

This certain aspect of the fandom loves analyzing the likes of Ben Askren, Michael Chandler, Michael ‘Venom’ Page, and Patchy Mix [just to name a few] as a way of comparing as well as contrasting between the depths of the talent pools from the respective promotions. Which is to say some fans love to scrutinize these UFC debutants through the lens of wanting to express how they feel the UFC is the industry leader. But it remains to be seen if Amosov’s efforts will belie the negative predictions of some of those bad faith types in MMA fandom.