Caio Borralho fights rising middleweight contender Yousri Belgaroui in the main card portion of UFC 334, which goes down Saturday in New York, and it puts his friend Alex Pereira on the opposite corner at Madison Square Garden.
Borralho has trained with “Poatan” multiple times in the past, both in the United States and at his base team The Fighting Nerds in Sao Paulo. On the other side, former GLORY kickboxer Belgaroui has joined forces with Pereira at Glover Teixeira’s team in Danbury to pursue his UFC
dream.
Speaking with MMA Fighting ahead of UFC 334, Borralho said he exchanged text messages with Pereira after the UFC booked the matchup.
“It was very smooth,” Borralho said of the conversation. “I actually sent ‘Poatan’ a message as soon as we booked the fight. I got to Brazil and told him, ‘I’m a fan of yours, you know that. We’re friends.’ He had even invited me to train together, and I said, ‘That’ll have to wait a little now that we’re going to be on opposite corners, but I have the utmost respect for you, Glover, and your team. After the fight, everything goes back to normal.’”
Pereira knows a thing of two about Borralho after multiple training sessions with him in the past, but the middleweight veteran doesn’t expect that to be an advantage for Belgaroui come UFC 334.
“Yousri is experienced enough not to let things influence him that way,” Borralho said. “Poatan and I have trained striking together, done MMA sparring together, and trained on the ground together, so Poatan knows the level of athlete Yousri is going to face. I’m sure that’s taken into account, but I don’t think it really influences Yousri in any way. They know he can’t go to the ground with me. They definitely know that.”
Borralho defeated Reinier de Ridder in his most recent octagon appearance to improve to 8-1 in the UFC. Belgaroui, on the other hand, is 3-0 in the UFC with three knockouts scored after joining the roster through Dana White’s Contender Series in September of 2024, finishing Azamat Bekoev, Mansur Abdul-Malik and Djorden Santos in devastating fashion.
That rise, or the Pereira relationship, are not the reason why Borralho didn’t want this fight.
“My first reaction was, ‘This doesn’t make much sense,’” Borralho said. “I’m on my way to a title shot, but then, after thinking about it and calming down, it’s just another fight. I’m a fighter and I fight, and I want to do my best, put on a show, and face the best in the world. He’s coming off some good wins and good performances, so I thought it was a cool challenge.”
“It never crossed my mind to turn down the fight,” he added. “I asked if there was anyone else available because I would have preferred someone ranked higher. They said no, and right then I said it’s settled. ‘If this is the fight you guys want, let’s do it.’ We’re really excited.”
Borralho said Belgaroui, although ranked lower in the UFC, is “just as tough” as many top-ranked middleweights, but “I think I’ve already faced opponents just as tough as him, great strikers like him, so it’s nothing new for me.”
In fact, the Fighting Nerd said that fans who say he should immediately shoot for takedowns against the knockout artist “are not watching my other fights against the division’s top strikers” like Michal Oleksiejczuk, Jared Cannonier and Nassourdine Imavov.
“Maybe people need to watch those fights more to understand that I’m not just a grappler,” Borralho said. “I’m a complete MMA fighter, and I have the striking to go toe-to-toe with any striker in the world. … I think it’s just some people who don’t understand MMA, who get more emotional and stuff like that. Everyone who really understands the sport and understands fighting knows this is a dangerous fight for both of us in the striking department and an even more dangerous fight for him in the grappling department. Glover himself said that, and Poatan himself said that, so they know this isn’t a fight where he’s going to show up and it’ll be a grappler vs. striker. They know my striking is very well adapted to MMA and that they have a major challenge ahead of them. Everyone who understands fighting knows that.
“Usually, when a guy is really good at striking and comes over to MMA, if he faces a wrestler, he can’t really let his game flow because he’s always on the verge of getting taken down. They know that threat is always there in my game. In my first three fights, I took every opponent down, controlled them, took their backs, and put my jiu-jitsu game to work, which is something he’s not as experienced with. That will definitely make him try to guess what I’m going to do. And since I’m not just a grappler, I feel like I bring a slightly different game to this fight for him.”
