Usman Nurmagomedov defends his lightweight title in the first PFL card scheduled for 2026 as he takes on Alfie Davis in the main event headed for the Coca Cola Arena in Dubai on Saturday, Feb. 7.<\/p>\n
PFL CEO John Martin announced the news on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Nurmagomedov returns to action after most recently defeating Paul Hughes in a highly anticipated rematch in October that officially crowned him as PFL lightweight champion. Prior to that fight, Nurmagomedov held the Bellator lightweight title, which he had previously defended three times.<\/p>\n
With a 20-0 record with one no contest, Nurmagomedov remains one of the top fighters on the entire PFL roster. Following his win over Hughes in October, Nurmagomedov immediately shifted gears to help his brother Umar Nurmagomedov get ready for his fight in the same month and then prepared Islam Makhachev for his title fight victory at UFC 322 in November.<\/p>\n
Now the attention goes back on his own title defense scheduled for February.<\/p>\n
As for Davis, the 33-year-old veteran looks to pull off another upset when he returns to action in 2026 following an improbable run through the PFL lightweight tournament this past year.<\/p>\n
Davis scored an impressive finish over Clay Collard to kick off the tournament and then defeated former Bellator champion Brent Primus in the next round. He then pulled off a stunning upset to beat Gadzhi Rabadanov after he had gone an incredible undefeated run through PFL with six straight wins in the promotion.<\/p>\n
That all ended with Davis handing Rabadanov a loss in August and now he\u2019ll get his chance to face Nurmagomedov with the PFL lightweight title on the line in February.<\/p>\n
More fights for the PFL\u2019s return to Dubai are expected to be announced in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Usman Nurmagomedov defends his lightweight title in the first PFL card scheduled for 2026 as he takes on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295545,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,701,638,1863,8417,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-295544","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-latest-news","12":"tag-mma","13":"tag-pfl","14":"tag-pfl-news","15":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295544\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}