Most Rematches in UFC History
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About Most Rematches in UFC History
Bouts beyond a first meeting - fighters who keep running it back. Minimum 2 to qualify
This leaderboard ranks UFC fighters by how many of their bouts were rematches - that is, every fight beyond the first meeting with a given opponent. The maths is deliberately simple: total UFC bouts minus the number of distinct opponents faced. A trilogy contributes two to the total and a four-fight series contributes three. A fighter needs at least 2 repeat bouts to appear here, which is 90 of the 2,724 fighters with a UFC bout in our database; the count on the right of each row is exactly that figure, and the smaller line under each name shows the bouts and distinct-opponent totals it was calculated from.
Why rematches are their own statistic
The obvious assumption is that this just re-ranks the busiest fighters, and it does not. Jim Miller has more UFC bouts than anyone on this page - 47 of them - but they came against 44 different opponents, so he sits on 3. Donald Cerrone's 38 bouts were spread across 35 opponents, also 3. Meanwhile Max Holloway reaches 7 from 33 bouts and Brandon Moreno reaches 6 from just 20. Being matched against the same opponent repeatedly is a function of divisional depth, of title pictures that refuse to resolve, and of fights good enough that the promotion wants to sell them again - not of longevity. Compare this page with most UFC fights and the two lists barely overlap at the top.
Rematches also concentrate at the championship end of the sport. Nineteen pairings in UFC history have met three or more times, and the names attached to them read like a list of the era-defining rivalries: Figueiredo and Moreno four times, Edgar and Penn, Edgar and Gray Maynard, McGregor and Poirier, Holloway and Volkanovski, Couture and Liddell, Cormier and Miocic, Velasquez and Dos Santos, Usman and Edwards, Shevchenko and Grasso. A trilogy is the sport's way of admitting that one night was not enough to settle the question.
Read the figure alongside the denominator rather than on its own. Seven rematches out of 33 bouts is a different career shape to seven out of 27 - Tito Ortiz and BJ Penn hit the same total in six fewer fights, meaning more than a quarter of everything they did in the UFC was against someone they had already faced. Use the Active and Retired tabs to separate fighters who can still add to their total from those whose number is final, and the division filter to see which weight classes recycle their contenders hardest. For more context on how these rivalries shaped the rankings, see our ELO rankings and the full UFC stats collection.