Paulo Costa is stirring things up once again, calling out the UFC for refusing to book him in a title fight for UFC 332.
UFC 332 goes down on October 3rd from Salt Lake City and is being headlined by a vacant women’s flyweight title fight between Natalia Silva and Wang Cong. Not only is that an extremely underwhelming fight to put atop a major numbered card, the UFC had record breaking women’s 125 champ Valentina Shevchenko relinquish her title so Silva vs. Cong would be for a belt.
According to Costa,
none of this had to be. He was ready to fight at UFC 332 for an interim light heavyweight title, but the promotion refused to do it.
“UFC could put LHW interim belt in line for this,” Costa wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “I told them but they refused to, so *shrug*”
“Put the LHW interim belt in line and I WILL COME TO SAVE THE LHW DIVISION!” another tweet read. “UFC REFUSED TO PUT LWH INTERIM BELT IN LINE . Why? I don’t know.”
Costa does know: he’s on the final fight of his current UFC contract, and the UFC isn’t about to let someone with one foot out the door touch a belt. The 205 pound division has already been enough of a s–tshow with two light heavyweight champions relinquishing the title over the past three years. And as Costa pointed out, if the UFC was consistent they’d have made current injured champ Carlos Ulberg number three.
“The UFC doesn’t have a consistent standard of behavior or set of rules,” he tweeted. “UFC stripped Valentina out from her Belt due injury. [Yet] Carlos Ulberg is injured and MAYBE fight second semester 2027.”
We’ve got to hand it to Costa: he hasn’t been afraid to call out the UFC as he awaits the final fight on his contract before free agency. We’d actually suggest Costa is going beyond criticism into trolling. He knows they won’t book him into a title fight given his current contract status, no matter how weak their product ends up being as a result.
Costa’s plan now?
“If there no belt in line I gonna fight someone else for 3 rounds and get out of the UFC contract,” he wrote.
