UFC Abu Dhabi takeaways: Why Whittaker’s loss is good for the middleweight division

Former ONE Championship two-division champion Reinier de Ridder put the UFC’s middleweight division on notice with a split decision win over former titleholder Robert Whittaker in the main event of UFC Fight Night at Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, on Saturday.

Despite being knocked down and nearly finished by Whittaker, de Ridder showed his resolve by storming back to outpoint Whittaker and earn the win. De Ridder is 4-0 since making his promotional debut last November. What did we learn about the state of the middleweight division in de Ridder’s victory?

In the co-main event, former men’s bantamweight champion Petr Yan proved he’s still a force in the division with a unanimous decision win over Marcus McGhee. Could we see him challenging to reclaim the belt soon?

And what should we make of Shara Magomedov’s win over Marc-Andre Barriault on the main card?

Here are the biggest takeaways from Saturday’s UFC Fight Night card.

Robert Whittaker’s loss is sad, but best for the division

Whittaker is one of the modern OGs of the sport. No frills, just shows up and does the job. He was underappreciated early in his career. He won the UFC’s interim title in 2017 and was later denied the opportunity to unify that title against a big name like Michael Bisping or Georges St-Pierre. Instead, Bisping and St-Pierre fought each other, then retired. Whittaker’s reward for winning the UFC title turned into back-to-back matchups against the ridiculously tough Yoel Romero.

Whittaker went on to lose the belt in devastating fashion, getting knocked out in front of his home country fans by a generational talent in Israel Adesanya. He quietly went about the business of earning a second crack at Adesanya three years later, only to come up short in a close decision. He has been somewhat cast in the role of a divisional gatekeeper since. Both Dricus Du Plessis and Khamzat Chimaev, who will square off for the championship at UFC 319 next month, punched their tickets to a UFC title shot by defeating Whittaker.

I’m not ready for the Whittaker era to end, but throughout five rounds on Saturday, it was pretty clear that it is ending. Whittaker’s toughness, his will to win and his fight IQ are all still intact. But he’s 34 years old. De Ridder is only two months younger than “Bobby Knuckles” but moves as if the age gap were five years. If you told me Whittaker would have been up on the scorecards going into the championship rounds on Saturday (which he was), I would have confidently picked him to win. De Ridder also has experience in fights scheduled for five rounds, but not against this level of competition. De Ridder ended up winning both the fourth and fifth rounds — the fifth, unanimously.

De Ridder winning and surging ahead with his third win of 2025 is best for the middleweight division. De Ridder is getting better. Whittaker, as much as it hurts to say, is showing signs of slowing down. He’s still among the top fighters in the division and maintains all of the traits that made him a champion, but they’re all operating at one gear less. He still has fights left, but in terms of excitement for the 185-pound division, it’s de Ridder’s time.

Petr Yan could be the most underrated fighter in the UFC

In the past five years, there may not be a fighter in the UFC with a more misleading record than Yan. He won the UFC championship in July 2020, improving to a professional record of 15-1. He went on to lose his belt to Aljamain Sterling in his first attempted defense, disqualified in the infamous illegal knee incident of UFC 259.

Yan was responsible for the illegal shot, but it wasn’t a loss in the way we typically think of one. He went on to beat Cory Sandhagen for an interim championship in 2022 and was still widely considered one of the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world. Since then, he has fallen victim to razor-thin split decision losses to Sterling and Sean O’Malley, and he also lost to the eventual champion, Merab Dvalishvili. The Dvalishvili fight was the worst performance of Yan’s UFC career. Some of that is on Yan, but some of it was also a result of bad luck.

At the peak of his success — right around that disqualification loss to Sterling — Yan looked as good as any fighter in the world. Sterling surprised him in the rematch, turning a one-sided affair in their first bout into a competitive bout just one year later. And then O’Malley squeaked by in a decision that many fans felt was far more controversial than the one against Sterling. Yan’s three-fight skid culminated in a demoralizing loss to Dvalishvili in 2023. There are rumors that Yan had suffered an undisclosed injury ahead of that fight.

Yan hasn’t quite commanded the same attention since he lost the title. But if a few small things had played out differently, Yan may still be the bantamweight champion and a pound-for-pound candidate. And despite how one-sided the first fight was, a rematch against Dvalishvili is intriguing to me.

Shara Magomedov’s career will be a bumpy, fun ride

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Bloodied Magomedov prevails in slugfest against Barriault

Shara Magomedov and Marc-Andre Barriault put on a show at UFC 318 in Abu Dhabi.

It was extremely fitting, the interaction between Magomedov and UFC commentator Michael Bisping inside the Octagon immediately after Magomedov’s fight. After his win over Marc-Andre Barriault, the 31-year-old delayed the postfight interview to let Bisping know how happy he was to see the former UFC middleweight champion.

“You’re a big motivation to me,” Magomedov, who improved to 5-1 in the UFC, told Bisping. “Step by step, I will become champion.”

While Magomedov’s path to a UFC title won’t exactly mirror Bisping’s of years ago, I think they’ll be similar in that there will be plenty of ups and downs. Bisping’s route to a title was long and difficult, as he appeared in 25 fights before getting a title shot. Magomedov’s title aspirations will probably be decided well before 19 fights from now, but he appears destined to face obstacles along the way.

Saturday’s win was remarkably impressive. Magomedov’s high-level striking jumps off the screen, and his takedown defense was nearly perfect. He overcame adversity in Round 2, when Barriault crushed his nose with a flush right hand. The shot clearly bothered Magomedov, but he showed heart in not only coming back and winning the round, but finishing the fight standing over Barriault after a relatively dominant third round.

All that said, Magomedov was more than a 6-to-1 betting favorite on Saturday, according to ESPN BET. As good as it was to see him get the win, it’s also worth pointing out he did not dominate in the way a 6-to-1 favorite is expected to. In his appearance before this weekend, he suffered a decision loss to Michael “Venom” Page, who is a natural welterweight. There’s a lot to like about Magomedov, but it has already been demonstrated that he is not going to breeze his way to a UFC title shot. There will be a lot of adversity along the way.

But as he showed on Saturday, Magomedov is up for it. And the fact that he views Bisping as a source of motivation signals that he knows the hard path he’s in for.