{"id":376271,"date":"2025-12-28T15:18:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T15:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/376271\/"},"modified":"2025-12-28T15:18:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-28T15:18:10","slug":"makhachevs-advice-to-fighters-learn-english-be-interesting-or-get-cut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/376271\/","title":{"rendered":"Makhachev\u2019s advice to fighters: Learn English, be interesting, or get cut"},"content":{"rendered":"

The UFC did a little bit of roster housekeeping over December, letting 10 fighters go<\/a> since the start of the month. One of those fighters<\/a> was welterweight Rinat Fakhretdinov, who was 6-0-1 in the UFC. Fakhretdinov\u2019s last fight was a 54 second knockout of Andreas Gustafsson, but that wasn\u2019t enough to earn him a new contract<\/a> with the promotion.<\/p>\n

That stirred up a lot of emotions amongst the international MMA fanbase, who say stuff like the Arman Tsarukyan title situation<\/a> and now this Rinat Fakhretdinov release prove the UFC has a bias against Caucasus fighters. Khabib Nurmagomedov has discussed this topic<\/a> at length and now Islam Makhachev is sharing his opinion — although it\u2019s a lot more understanding towards the UFC.<\/p>\n

\u201cRinat is a good fighter with good skills,\u201d Makhachev told Ushatayka. \u201cBut the UFC needs fighters they can sell, who can make money, and Rinat would just go out there and win.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI tell guys at the gym now: the UFC doesn\u2019t need fighters who just beat everyone and stay quiet,\u201d he continued. \u201cLearn English, learn how to sell yourself, learn how to be interesting to the public. Because all of America loves wrestling, WWE.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe understand what\u2019s going on there and how it\u2019s all organized. They love the show. And because of that, you need to learn how to put on a show.\u201d<\/p>\n

The UFC has always leaned towards promoting the flashy, charismatic fighters on its roster over the quiet grinders, and that dynamic was just as prevalent when the promotion had a bunch of \u2018boring\u2019 American wrestlers racking up long win streaks without a title fight in sight. Colby Covington nearly got the Rinat treatment until he unleashed his \u201cChaos\u201d gimmick<\/a> upon the world. And now you have guys like Magomed Ankalaev letting his manager destroy his reputation<\/a> on X (formerly Twitter) because it\u2019s better to be hated than for people to be indifferent to you.<\/p>\n

As Islam said, those that put on a show get title shots. Those that don\u2019t are liable to get dropped at the first opportunity. What that says about the sport? We leave that up to you to decide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The UFC did a little bit of roster housekeeping over December, letting 10 fighters go since the start…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":376272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,785,85,1396],"class_list":["post-376271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376271","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=376271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/376272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}