TNT Sports’ Adam Catterall<\/a>.<\/p>\n“A lot of our champions are hurt right now. There’s a lot of things you have to deal with when you’re making these matches, with timing and everything else going on. … But yeah, it would’ve been Tom.”<\/p>\n
Aspinall has been sidelined since UFC 321 last October when he suffered an eye injury in a no-contest against Ciryl Gane. In his absence, Pereira and Gane are scheduled to fight for the interim heavyweight title in the co-main event of this weekend’s historic event in Washington. Pereira, the former middleweight and light heavyweight champion, is moving up to heavyweight for the first time.<\/p>\n
Aspinall, who underwent surgery on both of his eyes in February, still doesn’t have a time frame for his return. However, the UFC surely hopes to book Aspinall against the Pereira-Gane winner later in 2026.<\/p>\n
“This is a great fight that obviously means a lot in the heavyweight division,” White said of Pereira-Gane.<\/p>\n
Lightweight champion Ilia Topuria is slated to make his first title defense against interim champ Justin Gaethje in the main event of UFC Freedom 250, which will feature a total of seven fights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"UFC CEO Dana White revealed that heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall would’ve been fighting Alex Pereira at the White…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":724087,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,785,85],"class_list":["post-724086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-mma","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724086","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=724086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724086\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/724087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=724086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=724086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=724086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}