{"id":352002,"date":"2025-12-16T15:50:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T15:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/352002\/"},"modified":"2025-12-16T15:50:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T15:50:10","slug":"melquizael-costa-quietly-has-five-straight-ufc-wins-and-grand-plans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/352002\/","title":{"rendered":"Melquizael Costa quietly has five straight UFC wins \u2013 and grand plans"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>LAS VEGAS \u2013 Melquizael Costa met the media Saturday after his win over Morgan Charriere at UFC on ESPN 74.<\/p>\n<p>Costa (25-7 MMA, 6-2 UFC) took out Charriere (21-12-1 MMA, 3-3 UFC) with a head kick knockout just 74 seconds into their featherweight fight on the main card at the UFC Apex. The result was Costa&#8217;s first knockout finish in the UFC \u2013 though he was denied a post-fight bonus.<\/p>\n<p>Advertisement<\/p>\n<p>Still, the win was his fifth straight \u2013 and four of them came in 2025 alone, including a crazy stretch that saw him beat Andre Fili, Christian Rodriguez and Julian Erosa, the latter for a Fight of the Night bonus, in the span of just four months.<\/p>\n<p>And that has the 29-year-old thinking about a timeline that could include a shot at featherweight champion <a href=\"https:\/\/mmajunkie.usatoday.com\/fighters\/alex-volkanovski\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" data-ylk=\"slk:Alexander Volkanovski;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas\" class=\"link \">Alexander Volkanovski<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m going to go back to Brazil and make a Christmas project for the kids,&#8221; Costa said at his post-fight news conference. &#8220;Next year, I just want to fight a lot. Three fights is good. The first fight, (I want an opponent) in the top 10. Then the top five. Then I can go for the belt.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Check out Costa&#8217;s post-fight news conference in the video above.<\/p>\n<p>This article originally appeared on MMA Junkie: <a href=\"https:\/\/mmajunkie.usatoday.com\/story\/sports\/ufc\/2025\/12\/16\/ufc-espn-74-video-melquizael-costa-featherweight-title-plan-five-straight-wins\/87788061007\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" data-ylk=\"slk:Melquizael Costa: Five straight UFC wins, featherweight title plans;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas\" class=\"link \">Melquizael Costa: Five straight UFC wins, featherweight title plans<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LAS VEGAS \u2013 Melquizael Costa met the media Saturday after his win over Morgan Charriere at UFC on&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":352003,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,46098,786,785,31226,85,787,4908],"class_list":{"0":"post-352002","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-christian-rodriguez","11":"tag-fighting","12":"tag-mma","13":"tag-morgan-charriere","14":"tag-sports","15":"tag-ufc","16":"tag-ufc-apex"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352002\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}