Michael Bisping has turned a champion’s name into a verb, and the verb is an insult. Talking up Alexander Volkanovski on his show, in comments that circulated on r/MMA, Bisping called Volk “a fighter’s fighter” and then took a detour straight through Dagestan: “He’s not one of these guys doing an Islam, we’ll get to that later in the show, fighting once a year and then picking and choosing who he fights and letting contenders face one another.”
That’s a cheap shot with a real point inside it. Bisping is mostly right, and the evidence came from the UFC’s own boss the same weekend.
The Dana White problem
After UFC 333, Dana White said Makhachev was booked for January and then pulled himself out. The way White told it, as clipped by Championship Rounds on X: “Islam fights like once a year. He was slated for January, and then said ‘I don’t want to fight until after Ramadan.’” White followed with the line Bisping was clearly echoing: “You can’t hold up divisions like this. You gotta keep moving.”
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The Ramadan piece deserves fair treatment, because it’s the part people will grab to dismiss the whole complaint. Fasting through a camp is brutal. Nobody sane wants a fighter cutting weight on no food and no water during daylight hours, and I’ve watched enough guys fade in Round 3 off bad cuts to know a depleted champion helps nobody. If the only issue were one postponement around a religious observance, I’d tell Bisping to sit down.
That isn’t White’s complaint, though. His complaint, in his own words, is “once a year.” Ramadan explains a January withdrawal. It doesn’t explain a calendar where the champion shows up roughly every 12 months and everyone else in the division runs in place. Championship Rounds also framed White as saying Makhachev hadn’t given the promotion a reason for skipping January, and the Ramadan quote reads more like a schedule preference than an explanation. If the promoter is saying this out loud on fight night, the frustration has been building for a while.
What Volkanovski did on the same card
Now look at the guy Bisping was praising. At UFC 333, Volkanovski finished Movsar Evloev in the second round and kept his belt. Evloev was the contender people had been waiting on for ages, the undefeated grinder who’d been lapping the featherweight field without getting the call. Volk gave him the call and closed the show before the halfway point of the fight.
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That’s the contrast Bisping wanted. One champion took on the most dangerous name available and finished him. The other, per White, looked at a January date and said not yet. Meanwhile Carlos Prates went on Instagram to call out Makhachev, which is what happens when a champion goes quiet: contenders start campaigning in public because there’s no schedule to point at.
Where Bisping overreaches
The “picking and choosing” line gets slippery, because Volkanovski is about to do some picking of his own. Right after the Evloev win, he said he wants to move up and fight Justin Gaethje as his retirement fight. “That’s something I’d retire for,” Volk said. “If they want to give me that opportunity, win or lose I’d retire.”
That’s a hand-selected superfight against a popular name outside his division. By the letter of Bisping’s complaint, it’s choosing your opponent. The difference is in the next sentence Volk offered: “I don’t want to hold divisions up, but I believe we could do this and not hold the divisions up.” He’s thinking about the featherweights behind him while he asks for the fun fight. Whether the UFC can pull that off logistically is a separate question, but Volk at least named the cost and asked for a way around it. Makhachev, at least in White’s telling, didn’t get that far.
That’s the line I’d draw. Every champion earns some say over what comes next, and a guy who just finished Evloev has more say than most. Picking a fight is fine. The problem is picking a fight once a year and letting the division stall while you do it.
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My take
Bisping’s phrasing is pure Bisping, built to get clipped, and “doing an Islam” will follow Makhachev around for a while. But underneath the jab, he and White are making the same argument. A belt is a job with a schedule, and Makhachev’s schedule, by his own promoter’s account, runs once a year with a January date already scratched. Volkanovski just finished his top contender, posed for photos with Petr Yan after both won, and immediately started asking for more work.
The ball sits with Makhachev now. Prates has already put his name forward. If the champion wants to make Bisping look wrong, the fix is simple: take a date as soon as Ramadan ends and fight whoever the UFC puts in front of him.
