Pereira, 38, relinquished his UFC light heavyweight title last week<\/a>, which portended something was in the works.<\/p>\n“[Pereira] moving up to take on a guy like Ciryl Gane? The way that these two fight, it’s gonna be very, very interesting,” White said. “And should he win the fight, then we figure out what’s going on with Tom Aspinall and it could be him vs. Aspinall.”<\/p>\n
Pereira, a former middleweight champion as well, regained his light heavyweight title with a first-round TKO of Magomed Ankalaev in October 2025.<\/p>\n
Gane, 35, is a former interim heavyweight champion who lost his title to Francis Ngannou in 2022 and then lost another title shot to Jon Jones in 2023.<\/p>\n
Advertisement<\/p>\n
UFC Freedom 250 full card<\/p>\n
Lightweight: champion Ilia Topuria vs. interim champion Justin Gaethje<\/p>\n
Interim heavyweight title: Alex Pereira vs. Ciryl Gane<\/p>\n
Bantamweight: Sean O’Malley vs. Aiemann Zahabi<\/p>\n
Lightweight: Mauricio Ruffy vs. Michael Chandler<\/p>\n
Middleweight: Bo Nickal vs. Kyle Daukaus<\/p>\n
Featherweight: Diego Lopes vs. Steve Garcia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The UFC announced Saturday that lightweight champion Ilia Topuria will face Justin Gaethje in the headliner of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":510750,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[116832,4,450,123296,9852,451,213184,231664,203305,3,452,453,6493,231665],"class_list":["post-510749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-breaking-news","tag-alex-pereira","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-charles-oliveira","tag-dana-white","tag-headlines","tag-heavyweight-champion","tag-ilia-topuria","tag-justin-gaethje","tag-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories","tag-ufc","tag-ufc-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=510749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/510750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=510749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=510749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=510749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}