The tenth season of Dana White’s Contender Series enters its final three Tuesdays with the arithmetic favouring history for the first time: 34 contracts banked, 12 needed to catch the all-time record of 46, and a required rate of four per week that the season has beaten every single Tuesday. Week 8 runs from the Meta APEX at 7 p.m. ET on Paramount+, all ten fighters through Monday’s scale at Palace Station, and five more unbeaten records walk into the arithmetic.
The main event puts lightweights in the closing slot for the first time all season, and the matchmaking follows the season’s signature: nobody gets a coronation. George Staines, the unbeaten Englishman at 10-0 out of Next Generation Liverpool, the gym that built Darren Till, arrives as the card’s headline pedigree, a former IMMAF standout seasoned on the Cage Warriors circuit whose graduates, Clancy, Darby, and Dublin’s campaigning champion McCorry, have threaded our coverage all season. At 25, per Combat Press’s assessment, he has not yet hit his prime and is already this complete. The books make him -300, but the man across the cage is built to spoil: Loai Abushaar, the 6-foot-3 MMA Lab product who would match Jalin Turner as the tallest lightweight on the roster, brings a 7-1 record, a 100 percent finish rate, and a seven-fight finishing streak with six first-round stoppages into his third appearance of the year. An unbeaten technician against a giant who has never heard a final horn is exactly the closing fight a contract-chase Tuesday deserves.
The name scouts have circled longest sits in the card’s other featherweight bout. Ilias Bulaid, the 31-year-old Dutchman at 9-0 out of SB Gym, is Combat Press’s pick as one of the best fighters in the entire ten-episode season, a kickboxing-bred striker with Bellator stage time who arrives with the path-to-the-UFC framed as when, not if. The matchmakers’ answer to that certainty was to price it out of existence: Brazil’s Erick Visconde brings 17-3 and a veteran’s twenty-fight education into a bout the books make nearly even at -130, the season’s collision doctrine applied to its most touted name. The other 145-pound fight is the card’s promised violence: Peru’s Ian Escuza, the unbeaten Inka FC champion whose seven wins are seven finishes built on spinning attacks and Muay Thai flash, cornered by TUF alum Cristiano Marcello and WEC veteran Chad George, meets Italy’s Luca Borando, 9-1 with a five-fight knockout streak, in a true pick’em that Combat Press projects simply: while it lasts, an absolute firefight. Sixteen wins and one loss between them, fifteen of the wins by stoppage.
The strawweights carry the week’s best wrinkle. Camila Reynoso, the 23-year-old Argentine at 9-1, served as an alternate on the Ultimate Fighter season that crowned its champions at the APEX just three days ago; instead of a house, she gets an audition, against Brazil’s unbeaten Aieza Bertolso, who arrives at 7-0 and a steep -500. And the heavyweights open the evening with more pedigree than the billing suggests: Senegal’s Adama Diop is a former heavyweight champion of both South Africa’s EFC and France’s Hexagone MMA, five knockouts among his six wins, meeting Russia’s unbeaten Zaurbek Sabanov of Vladikavkaz’s Valhalla Club, the 4-0 favourite at -380. Heavyweight remains the division where one Contender Series performance rewrites a career regardless of what preceded it, which makes the opener worth arriving early for.
The stakes above the card are the ones the last three Tuesdays taught. Thirty-four contracts have come with a doctrine attached: three straight weeks have sent a winner home empty-handed, two wars signed all four participants last Tuesday, and the front row has made the terms explicit. Winning is the entry fee. Violence is the currency. With twelve deals to find in three cards and five zeros on the line, Week 8’s ten auditioners know exactly what the record chase pays for, and exactly what it does not.
Tuesday, 7 p.m. ET, Paramount+. Three weeks left. Twelve to find.
