The main event is the fight that should have happened two weeks ago. Ilias Bulaid, the unbeaten Moroccan-born kickboxer out of the Netherlands’ SB Gym, was scheduled to face Erick Visconde in Week 8 before illness forced him out on fight day. Rather than scrap the matchup, the matchmakers moved it to the finale. Bulaid arrives 9-0 with a kickboxing pedigree and Bellator stage time, the prospect Combat Press rated among the best in the entire season. Visconde, 17-3, arrives as the reigning LFA featherweight champion with a veteran’s twenty-fight education. A blue-chip striker against an established regional champion is as fitting a closing fight as the season could offer.
The fight drawing the most attention sits beneath it. Aline Pereira, 36, the younger sister of former two-division UFC champion Alex Pereira, gets her audition at women’s bantamweight. She is 3-2 in MMA and a Karate Combat champion, and the family connection runs deep: her brother has spent this month cornering his own coach in London and preparing for his December heavyweight fight with Sergei Pavlovich. Across from her is Sweden’s Smilla Sundell, just 21, a former ONE Championship women’s strawweight Muay Thai world champion who is 2-0 in MMA. Two elite strikers with short MMA records, fifteen years apart in age, is the kind of contrast that tends to produce a decisive result one way or the other.
The remaining three bouts complete the card. At welterweight, American William Rentz, 8-2, meets Brazil’s Luis Francischinelli, 6-1. Brazilians Davi Cabral and Douglas Da Lapa meet at middleweight, and lightweights Jason Asher and Gregory Foster close out the lineup.
The season’s doctrine looms over all ten auditioners. Through nine weeks, Dana White has rewarded finishes and withheld contracts from winners who could only grind out decisions: Apollo Gomes, Tyshawn Williams, Norbert Novenyi Jr. and, last week, Alivia Bierley all won and went home without deals. At the same time, the front row has signed losers whose fights demanded it, from Taner Trembley in August to both Jaden Ortega and Callum Connor in a single September night. On a card where the record needs nearly every fight to pay out, that second precedent may matter as much as the first.
One promise from this season will go unfulfilled. Williams, told in Week 6 that he would receive another audition before the season ended, is not on the finale card. Whether that chance carries into next season, or arrives in some other form, has not been announced.
Season 10 has already delivered a historic first slam knockout, the boss’s own runner signing on the strength of a 117-second finish, a sheriff’s deputy who went from audition to UFC debut bonus inside two weeks, and the highest praise White has ever given a Contender Series fighter. Tuesday decides whether it also gets the record.
Tuesday, 7 p.m. ET, Paramount+. Five fights. Five contracts to make history.
