Alex Pereira

From GLORY to two UFC belts

Alex "Poatan" Pereira is a 38-year-old Brazilian who arrived in MMA after a long kickboxing career — two-division GLORY Kickboxing champion (middleweight and light heavyweight) with notable wins over Israel Adesanya (three times), Yousri Belgaroui, Donovan Wisse, and Simon Marcus — and has translated that pedigree into two UFC title reigns in three years.

He won the UFC middleweight title in November 2022 by TKO of Israel Adesanya at UFC 281, lost it to Adesanya by KO in the rematch at UFC 287 (April 2023), moved up to light heavyweight immediately afterward, and won the light heavyweight title from Jiří Procházka at UFC 295 in November 2023 (TKO, round 2). He has defended the light heavyweight title against Jamahal Hill, Procházka (rematch, KO via head kick at UFC 303), Khalil Rountree Jr., and Magomed Ankalaev across a 2024 calendar that produced the busiest schedule of any reigning champion in modern UFC history.

The style

Pereira's game is built around a small number of techniques executed with extraordinary precision and timing. The core repertoire:

• The left hook: Pereira's left hook to the temple is the most feared single punch in modern MMA. It finished Adesanya at UFC 281 (the round 5 KO that gave him the middleweight belt), Jamahal Hill at UFC 300 (round 1 KO that retained the LHW belt), and dropped Jiří Procházka multiple times across their two bouts.
• The body lead hook: a wide lead hook to the rib cage that opens up the same-side liver, often used as a setup to draw the opponent's elbow down before a left hook to the head. Khalil Rountree fell to a body-lead variation at UFC 307.
• The leg kick attack: low calf kicks and rear thigh kicks that compromise opponent movement over the course of a fight. The Ankalaev fight at UFC 313 in March 2025 showcased this — Pereira's leg kicks accumulated enough damage to disrupt Ankalaev's wrestling-heavy game plan.
• The high kick: drawn from his GLORY background, deployed once the opponent's hands drop from accumulated body and leg damage. The KO finish of Procházka in the rematch (UFC 303, June 2024) came from a left high kick after Procházka stood and traded in the pocket.

The grappling improvements

Pereira's MMA career has been the story of an elite striker progressively closing his grappling gaps. In his early UFC bouts, the grappling concern was real — he was a brown belt in BJJ at the time of his UFC debut and had been submitted in MMA early in his career (Yvel Lozano, 2015). By his light heavyweight title reign, he had moved to BJJ black belt under coach Glover Teixeira and developed adequate defensive wrestling to neutralize the takedown threats of Magomed Ankalaev — itself a stress test, since Ankalaev is among the cleanest wrestlers in the division.

The defensive grappling work showed in the Ankalaev fight: Pereira stuffed multiple takedown attempts, frame-and-circle exits from clinch positions, and never gave Ankalaev the extended top-control sequences he needed to win rounds.

The Procházka rivalry

The Procházka bouts are the most stylistically interesting pair of fights in Pereira's career. Procházka is an unorthodox striker who attacks from looping angles with both hands at once, and his willingness to trade in the pocket created exchanges that briefly threatened to upend Pereira's standard distance game. Both fights ended the same way: Procházka stood and traded, Pereira waited for the moment Procházka's chin lifted, and the left hook (UFC 295) or the left high kick (UFC 303) landed flush.

The cultural figure

Pereira's post-fight ritual — the bow-and-arrow celebration honoring his Indigenous heritage from the Pataxó people of Brazil — has become one of the most recognizable post-fight moments in MMA. The bow is held aloft, the arrow drawn, the "Poatan" nickname (a Pataxó word meaning "the stone hand") earned legitimately. He is also notable for the volume of training footage he releases via his Brazilian gym partners, which has made his camps unusually transparent to fans.

The case

Pereira is, as of 2026, the most active and most consistently finishing reigning champion in the UFC. His combination of power, precision, leg-kick accumulation, and improving grappling has produced a string of decisive title-fight finishes that compare favorably to any modern era. His losses in MMA are limited to early-career bouts and the single rematch defeat to Adesanya, and his ability to win in two divisions against elite competition (Adesanya at MW, Procházka and Ankalaev at LHW) puts him firmly in the conversation for the modern era's top fighter.