Ali Abdelaziz told MMA Junkie that he offered the PFL the opportunity to extend Nurmagomedov’s contract ahead of PFL New York, where the lightweight champion stopped Archie Colgan by first-round TKO on July 31 in the last bout of his deal. The promotion, per Abdelaziz, declined the number.
“The truth of the matter is, the PFL had the opportunity to sign him before the fight, and you know how much I love the PFL,” Abdelaziz said. “PFL has always given opportunities, and they don’t get enough credit. I put a number on the table for them for Usman to extend his contract, but the number, I thought was a fair number, but they chose not to.”
The framing that followed is the part that reads like a manager building a market.
“Usman took a risk, he could’ve went out there and lost,” Abdelaziz continued. “He took a risk and gambled on himself and he win. Now as a manager I have to talk to (other) people. They allow me to do that by not re-signing him.”
The gamble language is not decoration. Nurmagomedov entered the Colgan fight with no new contract in place, meaning a loss would have sent him to the open market as a beaten champion. Instead he walked out at 22-0 with one no contest, with the belt retained, the finish on tape, and the leverage entirely reset. Four days later, his free agency is the most consequential in the sport.
The mechanics still run through the PFL first. The promotion holds a 90-day exclusive negotiating window before rival organisations can formally engage, a standard term in its fighter agreements. Abdelaziz confirmed the window and left its outcome open in both directions.
“They have an exclusive negotiation but after that we’ll talk to other people and figure it out,” he said. “They could say to go and talk to other people and cut the time off.”
Nothing prevents the PFL from tabling a fresh offer inside the window, and the promotion’s new leadership has publicly signalled it wants to. CEO John Martin and co-founder Jake Paul have both made clear they intend to keep Nurmagomedov as a centrepiece of the newly merged MVP MMA. That intention now has a price attached, and per Abdelaziz’s account, the previous version of that price was already declined once.
The gravitational pull on the other side is not subtle. Asked at the UFC Belgrade post-fight press conference whether the UFC was interested in pursuing Nurmagomedov, Dana White answered with one word, “Sure,” and a smile that did a paragraph of work. Abdelaziz, notably, pushed back on the idea that anything is settled.
“Right now it’s not like 100 percent he’s leaving going to the UFC,” he said. “It doesn’t work like that.”
The decision chain matters here. Any deal requires Nurmagomedov’s own approval, and his cousin, head coach, and advisor Khabib Nurmagomedov must also sign off. Usman himself framed the UFC question in terms that go beyond a standard career move, tying it to his late uncle Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov’s long-running vision for the family. “This is the legacy. This is the father’s plan. We just trying to follow this.” Asked whether legacy or money drives the decision, he gave the blunter answer now hanging over the negotiation. Legacy, he said, does not pay the cheque. He has a family.
The matchmaking argument runs alongside the money. The consensus in Nurmagomedov’s camp, per the reporting, is that the PFL’s lightweight division no longer holds adequate challengers for him, a position that will read differently depending on where you sit. The promotion’s post-merger roster was pitched as a deeper competitive pool. The counter from the champion’s side is that depth on paper has not produced the names his team wants next. His head coach has already identified the toughest available test in the other promotion’s division, and Abdelaziz went further, predicting Nurmagomedov would stop Ilia Topuria inside four rounds if the fight ever happened. Topuria lost his own unbeaten record to Justin Gaethje by fourth-round stoppage at UFC Freedom 250 in June, a result Abdelaziz claims he called in advance.
For the merged MVP MMA, the situation is the first real stress test of the fighter-first framing the company launched with. Holding the line on a contract number is a defensible business position. Losing the undefeated face of a marquee division four days into the new era is a separate problem, and the two things can be true at once. This is precisely the retention question that walked out of UBS Arena with the champion, and how the company answers it inside the 90-day window will say more about the new structure than any launch communication did.
For the UFC, the appeal writes itself. A 22-0 lightweight with the Nurmagomedov surname walks into a division that already trades on the family’s lineage, with Islam Makhachev holding welterweight gold and Khabib’s shadow over the lightweight title’s modern history. Any debut would slot into a calendar hungry for fresh title-picture names, and White’s one-word answer has already done a portion of the marketing work, whether or not paperwork follows.
Abdelaziz did not disclose the figure the camp asked for, and the PFL has not publicly responded to his account of the negotiation. Both sides have room to revisit terms during the exclusive window. Absent a change, Nurmagomedov’s next signature will be the one that reshapes the lightweight conversation across two promotions at once.
The 90-day clock is running.
