Adesanya Rips Alex Pereira's 'If I Lose' Talk Ahead of UFC 335

Israel Adesanya has a message for his old rival before Alex Pereira walks into his second heavyweight fight: stop planning for failure. Pereira, the #3-ranked light heavyweight at 13-4 (11 KO), meets former title challenger Sergei Pavlovich at UFC 335 on Dec. 12 at Las Vegas' T-Mobile Arena. Ahead of it, Pereira floated the idea that a loss would send him straight back down to 205.

That's the part Adesanya can't stand. Speaking with Demetrious Johnson, the former two-division champ said he doesn't even get why Pereira is taking the fight, and that saying the words "if I lose" out loud is a mistake. His blunt question: what do you mean, if?

Four Fights, A Lot Of History

These two have circled each other across both sports. Pereira beat Adesanya twice in kickboxing, then stopped him in the fifth round of their UFC 281 main event in November 2022. Adesanya flipped the script five months later, knocking Pereira out cold at UFC 287 in April 2023 — a finish that took MMA Fighting's Knockout of the Year.

The bad blood has cooled since. Adesanya framed his criticism as a warning rather than a shot, telling Pereira to drop the act and get back to the version of himself that terrified the division. He kept repeating Pereira's old war cry — Chama — as shorthand for the mindset he thinks has gone missing.

Why Heavyweight At All?

Adesanya's bigger gripe is the move up in the first place. He pointed out that after Pereira's last outing against Ciryl Gane — which ended in a second-round TKO loss — staying at 205 would have made more sense. Adesanya noted Pereira was already a big body at 185, and that nobody questioned his weight cuts until Adesanya knocked him out.

So the subtext writes itself. Pereira's heavyweight experiment is one win from looking like a detour and one loss from looking like a mistake he's already half-planning to abandon. Pavlovich, who's shared the cage with the division's elite, gets to be the test. Dec. 12 decides which story sticks.