(ZUFFA, LLC)
Rafael Fiziev did not so much win the UFC Baku main event as decide he could not lose it. The Azerbaijani-rooted lightweight, on a four-loss-in-five skid and badly in need of a result, knocked out Manuel Torres by spinning wheel kick and follow-up punches at 0:15 of the second round on Saturday at the National Gymnastics Arena, ending the most consequential 25 seconds of his 2026 in front of a partisan home-region crowd.
He told reporters afterward he could barely see when he threw the kick.
“Bro, I couldn’t see anything in my left eye,” said Fiziev, 33, in the cage. “He launched a jab in the first round. When I opened my eyes, everything was doubled. I thought, what the f can I do now? I just threw the spinning back kick, and you know what happened now.”
Torres (17-4) had walked in on the kind of run that made him the favourite in the betting market: eight wins in his last nine, every fight ending in the first round, every result a stoppage. The Mexican lightweight had not seen the second round of a UFC fight in his career. He saw 15 seconds of it on Saturday before Fiziev’s kick caught him on the temple, dropped him, and finished the fight with a brief follow-up barrage. Fiziev (14-5) collected Performance of the Night for the finish, one of four $100,000 bonuses awarded on the card.
The technique was, by coincidence, the second high-profile spinning wheel kick of the month in the UFC. Mauricio Ruffy used the same move to drop Michael Chandler, followed by a barrage of punches at UFC Freedom 250 on June 14. Both finishes will live on highlight reels for the rest of the year, and Fiziev’s account of throwing his essentially blind only adds to the texture of it.
For Fiziev, the win reorders the conversation around him. The two-year stretch since his last meaningful contender push had produced losses to Justin Gaethje (twice), Mateusz Gamrot, and Mauricio Ruffy in February. The Ruffy result in particular had pushed the post-fight chatter from “Fiziev is rebuilding” toward “Fiziev’s ceiling is set,” and Saturday was the kind of moment that pushes it back. He said in his post-fight interview that he had taken inspiration from Gaethje’s upset of Ilia Topuria at UFC Freedom 250, treating the same kind of long-odds comeback story as a script he could follow.
“I’m so happy, bro. I’m so happy.”
The Torres question is the other side of the result. He had built a reputation on first-round violence, but that template has now run into a higher-end technical lightweight willing to absorb the early storm and counter through it. He remains a credible name. He needs a different kind of next fight, an aggressive but unranked opponent who lets him answer a specific question about his game when the first wave does not break his opponent.
The co-main event between Sharabutdin “Shara Bullet” Magomedov and Michel Pereira followed a similar template of “fighter survives early disaster to control the rest of the bout.”
Pereira, a Brazilian middleweight whose game runs through unorthodox striking and acrobatic transitions, came out sharp and landed a clean right hand down the pipe in the opening minute that dropped Magomedov hard. The Brazilian followed up with ground-and-pound from top position for most of the round, briefly pausing only when referee Herb Dean stepped in to warn Magomedov against pulling Pereira’s hair. The first round was decisive for Pereira on every card.
It was also, as it turned out, the only round Pereira would win.
Magomedov (17-1) recovered between rounds, opened the second working behind his kicking arsenal, and by Round 3 was the only fighter offering meaningful offence. Pereira (32-16, 2 NC) attempted one takedown midway through the third, was stuffed, and accidentally poked Magomedov in the eye on the scramble back up. After the restart, Magomedov landed a heavy body kick in the final ten seconds that visibly hurt Pereira and sealed the round. All three judges scored it 29-28 for Magomedov.
The result moves Magomedov to 17-1 with his second consecutive win after a unanimous-decision loss to Michael “Venom” Page in February 2025. The performance, as UFC’s own recap noted, raised as many questions as it answered. The first-round knockdown highlighted a vulnerability that better-rounded middleweights will look at on tape. The Round 2 and 3 recovery suggested he has the fight IQ and conditioning to absorb adversity. Where he sits in the divisional pecking order behind champion Sean Strickland and contenders like Khamzat Chimaev, Nassourdine Imavov, and Dricus du Plessis will depend on whether his next assignment tests his striking against a wrestler or his cardio against an output-heavy boxer.
Elsewhere on the card, Abdul-Rakhman Yakhyaev (10-0) delivered the fastest finish of the year, knocking out Julius Walker in eight seconds of his UFC debut at light heavyweight. The Russian’s nine stoppages now include eight in the first round. He collected Performance of the Night and walked out with one of the biggest first impressions a debutant has made all year.
Asu Almabayev submitted Charles Johnson by Suloev stretch at 3:33 of Round 3 at flyweight, one of the rarer submissions in MMA and the kind of finish that travels on social. Almabayev’s three-fight win streak since his only UFC loss, to Manel Kape, should move him at least a couple of spots in the rankings and inch him closer to a possible Kape rematch.
Matheus Camilo silenced the crowd by knocking out hometown favourite Nazim Sadykhov with a clean right hand in the opening round, with the referee waving it off after four hammer strikes. Sadykhov, a two-to-one favourite, immediately protested the stoppage as the National Gymnastics Arena fell quiet.
Ikram Aliskerov and Abusupiyan Magomedov each picked up clean wins at middleweight, Aliskerov by 30-27 unanimous decision over Brunno Ferreira and Abusupiyan Magomedov by first-round guillotine on Michał Oleksiejczuk. Farman Hasanov beat Eric Nolan by unanimous decision to close out the prelims and give the host country a second local victory.
Six of the first seven preliminary card bouts ended inside the distance, and seven of the night’s twelve scheduled fights ended in stoppages. The full Performance of the Night winners were Fiziev, Almabayev, Yakhyaev, and Daniil Donchenko.
For UFC’s second-ever event in Azerbaijan, the show did what regional cards are supposed to do. The local headliner won. The crowd went home happy. The matchmakers got new questions to answer about a 155-pound division that just had Gaethje upset Topuria two weeks earlier, and now has Fiziev back in the conversation he was supposed to have aged out of.
The clock, in Fiziev’s case, just got reset. Half-blind, mid-second-round, with a spinning kick he could not see land.
