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Another Bellator champion is speaking out against the way PFL has managed the promotion since purchasing it.

Bellator featherweight champion Patricio Pitbull is sick of waiting around for PFL to schedule him and has taken to social media to speak out against the promotion for its treatment of Bellator fighters since purchasing the company in November 2023.

Pitbull (real name Freire) added his voice to complaints from fellow Bellator fighters Patchy Mix and Leandro Higo, who had their bantamweight title fight cancelled when PFL pulled the plug on a Bellator Champions Series Paris event.

“I haven’t fought since February,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “I wanted to fight 3x this year, but I was told I’d have to wait until December 31st and found out online my opponent would fight someone else. Then they had a replacement, I bring people over, spend more money with the camp and there’s no fight. They said things didn’t work out with Japan and that it wasn’t their fault. OK. So why don’t you stage a show somewhere else?”

“What kind of promotion can’t give fighters at least two fights a year?” Pitbull asked. “Some haven’t even fought this year! Bellator used to be BIG. Things worked and we always had answers. They never just cancelled a show and said they had no idea when we would be booked. Even regional promotions have dates set for April of next year already! This merger has been a disaster to the sport of MMA.”

“Meanwhile we have to see the top brass talking about offering tens of millions of dollars to social media personalities and semi-retired fighters, while cutting 90% of the roster and telling guys making 30+30 they’re too expensive. How can you become number 1 in the world if you don’t stage events and don’t want to pay fighters?”

“I am very worried about the future of Bellator and MMA in general,” Pitbull concluded. “I feel very sorry for all the fighters who didn’t even get to fight this year or were cut because they just don’t make shows or think they’re expensive, and all the fighters who were forced to take paycuts.”

This is wrong. We need answers, we need the fighters and fans to be respected. This is not a game or just some business, these are people’s lives we are talking about. A serious promotion would give fighters the chance to fight at least 3 times a year if they’re healthy.”

Bellator fighters have been treated as the red-haired stepchildren of the PFL since the promotion was bought out. The promotions remained technically separate, with PFL promising to fulfill their contractual obligations to Bellator’s broadcast partners. Less important to them, it seems, are their obligations to provide Bellator fighters with regular fights.

Patricio Pitbull is just one of a few Bellator champions to castigate the PFL for their fight scheduling. There’s bantamweight champion Patchy Mix. And Women’s featherweight champ Cris Cyborg was very vocal with her frustration in getting a single fight out of the company this year. For all the talk of being the No. 2 promotion in the sport based on top fighters signed, PFL needs to stop stalling out their careers.

The worst thing promoters can do to a fighter is fight them and not pay. The second worst is sign them and not fight them. We’re seeing a lot more of the second these days, and as Pitbull said, it does not bode well for the future health of the sport.

Here’s what you may have missed!

It’s not everyday an interesting women’s Flyweight prospect come along. The division’s Top 10 has been largely stagnant in recent years, made up of the same old faces and Strawweights opting to skip out on their diets. The two exceptions are Manon Fiorot and Erin Blanchfield, who are likely the next two-in-line for title fights and do represent a significant challenge to Valentina Shevchenko.

By and large, it’s an open field to climb the ranks quickly.

Enter Wang Cong, who had every element fans could hope for in an exciting new prospect. First and foremost, “The Joker” can fight! An accomplished Wushu Sanda practitioner — not unlike Strawweight queen Zhang Weili — and former professional kickboxer, Cong has a depth of skill to her game and level of experience that most in her division cannot match. She’s also physically powerful, as evidenced by her brutal debut knockout win, which lasted just a single minute.

Best of all, Cong came with a prepackaged narrative. She defeated Shevchenko years ago in kickboxing, and nobody has forgotten Alex Pereira’s rise up the ranks to (briefly) dethrone Israel Adesanya. Grasso diversion aside, “Bullet” has been atop the Flyweight pack for a long, long time, and some bad blood with a former foe would sell nicely.

As with “Poatan,” UFC understood the assignment and matched Cong with a striker that Cong was massively favored to defeat. Indeed, the fight played out that way for most of its runtime until Gabriella Fernandes clocked Cong with a big shot in the second, jumped her back, and finished via strangle.

The question immediately rises: was this a fraud check? Was this a classic case of Cong never being that good and the general fanbase being too quick to jump on a hype train? Is all hope lost?!?

I have to say, my verdict is a resounding “Not Guilty” to the fraud check allegations. Cong didn’t look bad here. She put together good, effective offense and showed off her powerful kickboxing. She didn’t give up any takedowns. When she was submitted, it was more excusable in that she had already been rocked.

The truth is likely that Gabrielle Fernandes is better than her previous 1-2 UFC record indicated. Those pair of defeats demonstrated an issue with getting held down on the floor, but that’s not Cong’s game. Fernandes is a former LFA champion — a serious accomplishment — with a jiu-jitsu black belt who is better known for her striking. She’s unusual in her ability to hang in the pocket with Cong, take those power shots, and answer with her own offense.

Not many Flyweights are going to be able to replicate that strategy.

In the long term, Cong can still climb the ranks. She still has standout physical gifts and interesting skills in a fairly empty division. The unfortunate part of this loss, however, is that her Pereira moment is gone. There’s no longer any chance of rocketing up the ranks into a “Bullet” rematch. That narrative has been squashed, and Cong will have to climb the ladder rung-by-rung like someone who hasn’t previously beaten Shevchenko.

On the bright side, it should still be quite fun to watch.

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Musumeci has signed a special contract with UFC as part of the promotion’s move into grappling, but hopes to one day fight in the UFC as well.

Mikey Musumeci made history last week, becoming the first BJJ practitioner to be signed to an exclusive UFC contract. And while the four-time IBJJF champion intends to focus on growing the sport of grappling through that contract, he admitted in a recent interview that mixed martial arts (MMA) is still on his radar.

“I have the desire to maybe do MMA again in the future,” Musumeci told MMA Fighting over UFC 309 weekend. “I’m young, my body is very young. I’ve never taken steroids, so my body is like 20, 21, actually. I can have many more years of competition still.”

That’s in comparison to another of grappling’s established stars, Gordon Ryan, who continues to struggle through career-jeopardizing health issues. Then there’s Craig Ryan, who is making waves with his Invitational events but seems nearly done with actual competition. The 28-year-old “Darth Rigotoni” hopes to have a long future ahead of him, including actual fights in the UFC.

“Being in the UFC now, I’ll have the opportunity to train with a lot more people that I wouldn’t in the past, and learn from them on the feet, takedowns, wrestling,” he said. “The first thing I loved in life was MMA. If I can have the opportunity to fight MMA in the UFC, that’s going to be a dream, too.”

But first things first: Musumeci is set to be the lynchpin in the UFC’s plans to build out a grappling division. The first step in that process is an appearance at UFC Fight Pass Invitational 9 (UFC FPI 9) on December 5th, where he’ll face Felipe Machado.

“I want to do MMA, but the gift God has given me was jiu-jitsu, so I have to grow our sport first,” he said. “I can’t leave our sport before helping it grow to a place where other people, other kids can have an organization to compete at in the future.”

Musumeci is coming off a 7-0 run in ONE Championship where he helped develop that promotion’s grappling division into must-watch programming. He left under shady circumstances, though, after a last minute switch from a 170 pound match to 135 pound match led to a botched weight cut and a ‘life threatening’ bout of pneumomediastinum, where a rupture in the lungs leads to air in the chest cavity.

Musumeci refused to bad-talk ONE, whose mistreatment of athletes is becoming notorious, but did use an interesting word to describe how things will be better when more grapplers join him under UFC contracts.

“The problem with many organizations now, brother, is that [athletes] are not safe,” he said. “Sometimes they have money, sometimes they don’t. Too much politics. Now, with the UFC, we finally have an organization that will be safe and more professional with other people. My dream is to make this sport grow.”