Liz Carmouche wants to know why she isn\u2019t fighting for the PFL flyweight championship next and why Dakota Ditcheva isn\u2019t standing across from her when she returns to the PFL cage in San Diego on June 27.<\/p>\n
Carmouche won the 2025 season of the PFL with wins over Ilara Joanne, Elora Dana and Jena Bishop, a tournament that did not include 2024 champion Ditcheva. As 2026 started, and PFL transitioned to a new format moving away from seasons, Carmouche expected to face the English flyweight for the belt in 2026. Instead, she\u2019s battling UFC veteran Viviane Araujo on June 27, while Ditcheva returns a month later versus Denise Kielholtz.<\/p>\n
Speaking with MMA Fighting on Tuesday, Carmouche admitted she doesn\u2019t have a clue as to why her next fight isn\u2019t for the belt.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wish I could answer that. I can\u2019t [laughs]. I\u2019ve been asking the same thing,\u201d Carmouche said. \u201cI thought coming out of the tournament that the only match-up that made sense was last year\u2019s champion versus the year prior champion, but they have a different agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carmouche said \u201cto some degree\u201d she was surprised to see Ditcheva booked against a different opponent four weeks later instead of having them fight each other, but already expected that to be the path since PFL first booked Ditcheva vs. Kielholtz in January.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs far as I\u2019m being told, it\u2019s at her pace and her wants, not mine,\u201d Carmouche said.<\/p>\n
Does that mean Ditcheva is avoiding her?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt certainly seems that way,\u201d Carmouche said. \u201cOf course, I want to be fighting the best and prove that I\u2019m the one that deserves to be having that belt and to be a contender for the belt, if not the belt holder. But I certainly understand they want to protect their future. They invested a lot of money into her, and she\u2019s the face of PFL. So you certainly don\u2019t want it to give it to somebody who\u2019s in their 40s, you want to give it to the young 20-year-old.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sooner or later, Carmouche believes \u201cit\u2019s an inevitable outcome\u201d that they will fight each other under.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the only way that it doesn\u2019t happen is if she decides that she wants to leave PFL and go to the UFC,\u201d Carmouche said. \u201cThat\u2019s the only way, in my mind, to slide past and get out of this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Disappointed with the direction things are going by not facing off with Ditcheva, Carmouche said she feels the uncrowned flyweight champion in PFL.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn my mind, I\u2019m the most recent champion,\u201d Carmouche said. \u201cThe way that the format was before is if you won the title in 2023, you start in 2024 and it\u2019s a clean slate, and everybody has an equal opportunity to fight to be the 24 champion, and then 25 and so on and so forth, right? It doesn\u2019t carry over from the previous year. So if I was the last holding and now we\u2019re going back to the original MMA format, in my mind, it makes sense that that is the current champion. Or at the very least, we should just be unranked and everybody\u2019s fighting for a rank this year. At this point, only the females that have fought in 2026 should be ranked and the rest of us should be unranked and trying to earn the right to be there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carmouche remains fully focused on beating Araujo later this month, an \u201cexciting\u201d opponent \u201cthat throws down and continues coming forward no matter what.\u201d Having said that, \u201cGirl-Rilla\u201d has also envisioned how she would beat Ditcheva in MMA.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that Dakota is another person that is able to push the tempo and make an exciting fight,\u201d Carmouche said. \u201cOne thing she\u2019s proven when she fought Bishop and a few others is everybody had questioned her ground game and thought that as long you can get her to the ground, you can finish her. And that was proven that\u2019s not necessarily true. So I think that striking-wise, we can throw a lot of back and forth and a lot of variability in there, but I also have faith in my ability to drag people into deep waters. And once you get to that fourth or fifth round, that\u2019s when I really start to wear people down and get them down in themselves and they make mistakes I\u2019m able to capitalize on. And I could see it being a solid finish against the cage, where it\u2019s a TKO, or even a submission on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Liz Carmouche wants to know why she isn\u2019t fighting for the PFL flyweight championship next and why Dakota…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":713103,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,1347,785,5963,7613,85],"class_list":["post-713102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-latest-news","tag-mma","tag-pfl","tag-pfl-news","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713102","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=713102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/713103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=713102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=713102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=713102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}