Costello van Steenis laughs heartily when asked what it was like to learn mixed martial arts around Benidorm.<\/p>\n
“Why do you think my English is so good?” he jokes.<\/p>\n
“There’s a lot of English people there, they make a big show of it and they’re the number one drinkers that’s for sure – but they’re really funny.”<\/p>\n
Benidorm is a city on the Mediterranean coast famous for its British holiday-goers, with around 830,000 visiting in 2024.<\/p>\n
Van Steenis was born in the Netherlands but moved to Altea, a town about 20 minutes drive away from Benidorm, as a youngster.<\/p>\n
It was there he fell in love with MMA by watching fighters such as American pair Rashad Evans and Jon Jones, before training and competing in a number of local amateur fights around Benidorm where he would compete up to three times per night.<\/p>\n
While Van Steenis was winning most of these fights, aged 20, the city’s party scene offered a distraction to his future ambitions in the sport.<\/p>\n
After a discussion with his father about wanting to take MMA more seriously, he decided the only way to further his career would be to move back to the Netherlands.<\/p>\n
“That’s one of the reasons I moved away. Spain has beautiful weather, beautiful people, a lot of distractions and a lot of partying,” says Van Steenis.<\/p>\n
“You want to have your focus and the people around you [in Benidorm] don’t have their focus, but that’s what you need.<\/p>\n
“It’s crazy, you can do everything there, but that’s also why I moved away – it was too nice.”<\/p>\n
Van Steenis describes Benidorm as “beautiful and feels like home”, and while he says he wants to move back one day, his career is the priority right now.<\/p>\n
On Friday, the 33-year-old will headline the biggest MMA event to ever take place in Spain at PFL Madrid when he defends his middleweight title against Britain’s Fabian Edwards.<\/p>\n
The 32-year-old Edwards is looking to become champion of his division at the third attempt following defeats by Johnny Eblen in 2023 and 2024 for the Bellator title.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Costello van Steenis laughs heartily when asked what it was like to learn mixed martial arts around Benidorm.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,638,82],"class_list":["post-546497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-fighting","tag-mma","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546497","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=546497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}