{"id":540146,"date":"2026-04-19T23:29:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-19T23:29:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/540146\/"},"modified":"2026-04-19T23:29:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-19T23:29:09","slug":"he-made-his-zuffa-decision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/540146\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018He made his Zuffa decision\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p dir=\"ltr\" style=\"line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt;\">His fellow Briton Chris Billam-Smith <a href=\"https:\/\/www.boxingscene.com\/articles\/chris-billam-smith-has-jai-opetaia-in-his-sights-following-zuffa-boxing-deal\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">so recently signing with Zuffa<\/a> potentially makes him the likeliest next opponent for the 30-year-old Opetaia, but Riley regardless told BoxingScene: \u201cI wouldn\u2019t take the Opetaia fight next, \u2018cause at the end of the day he made his Zuffa decision and what I grew up watching, and what I know, and what is prestigious to me, are the belts like the IBF, the WBC, [and] the WBA. If I\u2019m in a position to go and win one of those belts that I dreamed about having as a kid, I\u2019ll always pick that option first, over something new.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"His fellow Briton Chris Billam-Smith so recently signing with Zuffa potentially makes him the likeliest next opponent for&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540147,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,6102,10078,34696,101,56,54,55,88039,78289],"class_list":{"0":"post-540146","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-boxing-news","10":"tag-boxingscene","11":"tag-jai-opetaia","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom","16":"tag-viddal-riley","17":"tag-zuffa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}