Alex Pereira put his own sparring footage on social media Monday, and a big chunk of it is Glover Teixeira landing right hands on his chin.
The clip shows Pereira trading with Teixeira, his head coach, in what looks like hard rounds for a camp six weeks out from a fight. Both men let their hands go. Pereira also absorbed several clean rights straight to the jaw, which is the part everyone screenshotted. Championship Rounds circulated it on X with the caption “Alex Pereira ate some big shots from Glover Teixeira during sparring today 👀” and the replies did what replies do. Bloody Elbow collected the reaction Tuesday, and NDTV Sports, MMA Sucka and MMANews.com all ran with the video too.
The comments were brutal. “Oh yeah, he’s looking chinny,” one fan wrote. Another went with “That’s Pavlovich’s range, bro. He’s cooked.” A third skipped analysis and went straight to a prediction: “The Pereira era is over. I think he’s getting too much hate but it’s over. Sergei by round 1 KO.”
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The most useful one came from somebody who actually likes him: “I love Alex but he eats way too many shots, even at LHW he could just handle it better there. If he’s this persistent at staying at HW, he needs to train boxing and only boxing with some real defensive experts.”
The Pavlovich problem
The reason a gym video gets this much attention is the opponent. Pereira, 39, meets Sergei Pavlovich in the UFC 335 co-main event on December 12. It will be his second appearance at heavyweight. Pavlovich has nine UFC wins, and seven of them came by knockout. He’s widely regarded as one of the scariest punchers in the division, and he punches like a guy who resents the other man for standing in front of him.
Pereira’s first heavyweight run didn’t go to plan. He lost to Ciryl Gane at UFC Freedom 250, and Bloody Elbow noted that the way he reacted to that loss cost him a lot of goodwill with fans who used to treat him as a favorite. One commenter on the sparring clip pointed out that people were calling him the greatest striker ever back in 2024.
He still wants to become the first three-division champion in UFC history. He has also said he’ll leave heavyweight if he doesn’t beat Pavlovich. On top of that, he recently said he’ll retire once he starts losing on a regular basis. Israel Adesanya, who knows Pereira better than most from their rivalry, has publicly questioned his mindset after those comments.
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So the stakes on December 12 are pretty simple. A win keeps the triple-champ plan alive. A loss sends him back down, and with retirement already on his mind, it could send him further than that.
Quick take
I’d pump the brakes on reading a fight off a sparring clip. Pereira picked this footage himself and posted it, which tells you he thinks hard rounds with Teixeira are a feature of camp rather than something to hide. Old-school Brazilian gyms have always sparred like this. But the fan who said he eats too many shots is right, and that problem follows him into the cage. Teixeira is a crafty former champion. Pavlovich is a 250-pound knockout artist with seven UFC finishes who doesn’t need much of a look at your chin. If Pereira takes three clean rights from him on December 12, he won’t be reading the replies afterward.
