Adesanya Owns Up to 'One of the Most Boring Fights' Against Yoel Romero

Israel Adesanya doesn't do revisionist history. Revisiting his UFC 248 title defense against Yoel Romero from 2020, the former middleweight champion flatly called it one of the most boring fights in company history — 25 minutes of two dangerous men refusing to engage, capped by a decision almost nobody enjoyed watching.

The admission landed during a YouTube breakdown, prompted by Romero's recent bare-knuckle boxing loss to Darren Till, who carries an 18-5-1 MMA record (10 KO, 2 SUB) and most recently dropped a neck-crank submission to Dricus Du Plessis. Adesanya didn't soften it: this was the same man who gave the sport an all-time classic against Kelvin Gastelum, a fight now enshrined in the UFC Hall of Fame, and then turned in a stalemate on the opposite end of the spectrum.

Adesanya's explanation came down to mutual caution. He said Romero clipped him once with a shot so clean he saw four of the Cuban in front of him, and from that point he wasn't about to walk into another. Romero, for his part, simply never pressed the attack. The result was two elite strikers canceling each other out for a full five rounds.

To his credit, Adesanya didn't dump the blame entirely on his opponent. He accepted that he shared responsibility for the dud, framing it as Romero playing a careful game and himself refusing to risk eating another zinger. He still gave Romero his respect, calling him a legitimately dangerous man — just one he had no interest in trading with recklessly.

Why the Story Matters More Than the Fight

The real meat of Adesanya's commentary wasn't nostalgia — it was a critique of modern cards. He was breaking down UFC 332, an event some fans branded the worst in company history for its thrown-together vacant flyweight headliner between Natalia Silva and Wang Cong. Adesanya pushed back on that framing. Look at the actual card, he argued, and it's not that bad. What it's missing is star power and storylines.

His point is one the industry keeps rediscovering: people don't just buy fights, they buy narratives. The Embeddeds, the Countdown shows, the fighter vlogs — that's the connective tissue that gets casual viewers invested. Adesanya even reached for the obvious comparison, noting that people love to mock WWE but keep coming back for the storylines. Everyone likes a storyline, he said. A boring fight is forgivable. A card with no reason to care is harder to sell.