Israel Adesanya Wants the Light Heavyweight Belt!

Whoever was hoping for a rematch between Adesanya and Whittaker may be disappointed. It seems that the match won’t happen since UFC middleweight champ Israel Adesanya has no interest in it. He wants more, much more.

Eugene Bareman seems pretty confident that a rematch between his fighter, Israel Adesanya, and Robert Whittaker is not in the pipeline. The middleweight champion has other plans for his future. After a likely fight against Jared Cannonier, Adesanya would like to move up to the light heavyweight division, where currently the king is Jan Blachowicz.

Despite Whittaker defeated Cannonier at UFC254 consolidating his position as the only real contender for the middleweight belt, Israel Adesanya seems to have chosen an easy path knowing that a rematch with Whittaker may bring some serious issue. Who said that Adesanya was choosing only easy fights? Nah, not true. Adesanya perfectly knows that moving up of category with the middleweight belt will give him almost immediately a shot to Jan Blachowicz.

However, as we already know, in the UFC world there is only one person who counts when it comes to match-ups: Dana White. The UFC President has been clear, “Listen, when the fight was over on Fight Island, I was like, ‘I’m going to have to sit down with this kid [Adesanya] and convince him on why he needs to fight [Robert] Whittaker”. White continued, “Whittaker comes out and says he doesn’t want to fight him. Craziest s*** I’ve ever seen. So there’s no arguing with Israel now. I thought Whittaker deserved the shot and Whittaker doesn’t want it so we’ll let him do it”.

Given that also Mr. White has given his blessing, it will be just a matter of few months before we will see Israel Adesanya to knock on Jan Blachowicz’s door.