Yaroslav Amosov Booked for UFC Debut vs. winning welterweight in company history | BJPenn.com

Yaroslav Amosov will make his highly anticipated UFC debut before the calendar year ends, taking on one of the most prolific welterweights in the organization’s history. The former Bellator MMA welterweight champion will enter the octagon on December 13 and Amosov will face Neil Magny at the UFC Apex.

This will be the final card promoting the Ultimate Fighting Championship until 2025, with reports of this fight initially emerging via Best combat choices. News of Amosov joining the UFC’s drug testing pool had made headlines in recent weeks, with the latest news of his debut seeming inevitable. The Ukrainian standout will test himself against someone with a host of records in the UFC at 170 pounds.

Magny is the winningest 170-pound fighter in UFC history, holding additional UFC welterweight records for most fights and most fight time for that weight category.

Yaroslav Amosov’s fruitful path to the UFC

Yaroslav Amosov captured Bellator gold against Douglas Lima, and after a stint in the military in his war-torn homeland of Ukraine, unified the titles with then-interim champion Logan Storley in the first quarter of 2023.

In what is his only professional MMA loss, Amosov lost his BMMA gold to Jason Jackson in what was the last official Bellator MMA card before PFL acquired them. Amosov floated around for a while before a CFFC win over ex-UFC vet Curtis Millender in the first quarter of this year finally put him on the UFC’s radar.

Magny has won back-to-back bouts leading up to this bout, with a long company run that has seen him float in and out of the welterweight top fifteen since signing with the promotion over a decade ago. Before Amosov’s debut, he will likely have to deal with the rhetoric some mixed martial arts fans face as a former Bellator MMA striking steps into the UFC cage.

This particular aspect of the fandom loves to analyze the likes of Ben Askren, Michael Chandler, Michael ‘Venom’ Page and Patchy Mix [just to name a few] as a way to compare and contrast the depths of the respective promotions’ talent pools. That is to say, some fans like to scrutinize these UFC debutants through the lens of wanting to express how they feel the UFC is the industry leader. But it remains to be seen whether Amosov’s efforts will belie the negative predictions of some of those bad faith types in MMA fandom.