The Global Fight League have announced the promotion’s first four fights featuring multiple former UFC champions.
GFL has received a lot of scepticism throughout 2025 so far after the promotion announced their big plans ahead of their first event which is targeted for April.
The promotion’s roster may feature a lot of well known names in the MMA world but many of them are past their prime years and the first set of fight announcements is evidence of this.
They kicked off the run of announcements with a rematch between two former middleweight titleholders with Luke Rockhold and Chris Weidman running back their initial meeting that took place at UFC 194 a decade ago.
In the GFL’s first heavyweight matchup to be made official, two more former UFC champions will collide for the first time in their storied careers.
Fabricio Werdum and Frank Mir face off with neither man winning a fight in five years
Both Fabricio Werdum and Frank Mir have spent time at the pinnacle of mixed martial arts having held UFC gold.
For Werdum, who also recorded some huge wins in Pride, he was able to unify the UFC heavyweight belts by submitting Cain Velasquez (after beating Mark Hunt to become interim champion) at UFC 188 in 2015 before losing the title to Stipe Miocic in his first defense.
Mir’s title reign predates this with the American submitting Tim Sylvia at UFC 48 in 2004 having later gone on to win the interim title from Antonio Nogueira before failing to unify the belts in a huge clash with Brock Lesnar at UFC 100 in 2009.
Mir departed the UFC in 2016 and went on to sign with Bellator where his win over Roy Nelson in 2019 is the last time that he competed in MMA now that he is 45-years-old.
Werdum only parted ways with the MMA leader in 2020 following a win over Alexander Gustafsson but his one fight since then, a PFL bout with Renan Ferreira, resulted in a no contest following a controversial stoppage.
He returned to competition in September of 2023 where he suffered a decision loss to Junior dos Santos in Jorge Masvidal’s Gamebred Bareknuckle MMA.
At 47-years-old, Werdum will now take on Mir in a matchup between two of the heavyweight division’s most decorated submission specialists of all time.
Fabricio Werdum vs Frank Mir is a prime example of why fight fans have been critical of the GFL
If you’re trying to convince a fight fan why they should give the GFL a chance, the matchup between Fabricio Werdum and Frank Mir might not be the one to show them.
On one hand, both men are iconic figures in the sport and the fact that the two men never crossed paths in the UFC is incredibly surprising.
This fight also justifies a lot of the scepticism that fans had with Werdum and Mir being far past their primes without a consistent strength of schedule.
It’s a matchup that would have been exciting ten years ago and whilst they will likely still be competitive with one another, it’s far from the top level of mixed martial arts.