Who Should Be First in Line for a Shot at Sean Strickland's UFC Middleweight Championship?

T-Mobile Arena, the site of many a UFC mega-fight - Source: Unsplash

Split decisions rarely feel like split decisions from inside the cage. They feel like robbery to one guy and sweet validation to the other. Khamzat Chimaev walked into UFC 328 in Newark back in May as a fearsome 15-0 wrecking ball and the reigning middleweight champion of the world. His title defense against the brash Sean Strickland was supposed to be a cakewalk, and online betting sites knew it.

Heading into the bad-blood-filled affair, Ozoon online sports betting outlet listed the unbeaten champion as a -600 favorite to defend the gold, with Strickland out at +450. Shockingly, he walked out 15-1, and the number that mattered most to him — the zero — was gone. Two judges had it 48-47 for Strickland. One had it 48-47 the other way. Twenty-five minutes of violence came down to a handful of exchanges that three sets of eyes read three different ways.

Strickland's Prolonged Injury Absence

What almost nobody in the building knew, watching Strickland grind through five rounds with an economy that read as strategy rather than survival, was that his shoulder had been torn apart four days earlier. Sparring PFL champion Johnny Eblen at Plinio Cruz's gym that Tuesday, Strickland got driven into a wall and felt something give. He shrugged it off as a tweak. It wasn't — doctors would later diagnose a Type 2 AC separation, an extended Type V SLAP tear, and a partial rotator cuff tear, the kind of injury list that ends camps.

He fought anyway and beat the most fearsome fighter on the entire UFC roster to become a two-time champion of the world. He hasn't, however, stepped into the Octagon since, and three months removed from one of the greatest upsets in UFC history, fans are starting to get twitchy about what's next for the cage's most divisive champion. Here are the three leading candidates to welcome Strickland back to championship action.

Sean Strickland is now a two time UFC middleweight champion. pic.twitter.com/Hi0lJzsQGY

— Ozoon (@Ozoon_CA) May 10, 2026

Nassourdine Imavov

Ask the middleweight division "who's the man that nobody wants to fight," and Nassourdine Imavov's name comes up fast. Five straight wins. A statement decision over Caio Borralho in Paris that ended a serious unbeaten run. A knockout of Israel Adesanya before that. And still — nothing. No fight since last September, no title shot, while Strickland and Chimaev spent a year and a half feuding their way to the top of the marquee.

The grievance isn't abstract. Strickland beat him back in January 2023, at 205 pounds on six days' notice, before either man had touched middleweight gold — and Imavov's been carrying it like a stone in his shoe ever since. "I do not like him," he said recently, not performing anger so much as stating it. "He's not a good person. He talks sh*t every day. We already fought before, and he insulted me several times."

There's a version of this fight the UFC reportedly had lined up before Chimaev's camp started making noise and hijacked the conversation. Strickland has floated Imavov as the likely first defense. Whether "likely" actually comes to fruition when bigger money fights are on the table remains to be seen.

Dricus Du Plessis

Nobody carries more quiet entitlement than a man who's beaten the current champion twice and still isn't guaranteed anything. Dricus Du Plessis lost the belt to Chimaev at UFC 319 in a fight in lopsided fashion, snapping an eleven-fight win streak dating to 2018 in the process. DDP disappeared for eleven months before returning to action in July and picking up a dominant win against former welterweight king Kamaru Usman.

"I said a win wouldn't get me a title shot," Du Plessis said after. "But damn, a performance like that will."

That's the tell. He knows where he stands — 2-0 against the man holding the belt, once by split decision at UFC 297, once by a clean unanimous nod in the rematch — and he's still watching Imavov and Chimaev get the headlines. That should sting, and from how he talks about both men, it clearly does.

Khamzat Chimaev

There's no manufacturing what Newark had — the insults tied to Chimaev's Chechen background, the specific threats, a build-up nasty enough that both camps needed separating more than once during fight week. Then, oddly, real sportsmanship the moment the decision came down: Chimaev wrapping the belt around Strickland's waist with his own hands before disappearing without a word.

His team hasn't stopped pushing since. "The rematch with Sean Strickland is the only fight that Khamzat wants; he is obsessed with it," they told ESPN. "That's the only fight he will accept right now." Dana White has all but confirmed it's on the table: "Khamzat right now is asking for the rematch. We don't know what we're going to do yet." An Abu Dhabi date in October has been floated.

But Du Plessis and Imavov have both pointed out, not unreasonably, that a razor-thin loss in your first title defense shouldn't buy a line skip — and Strickland, asked point blank backstage, wasn't shy: go get a couple wins first. But in the end, when it comes to the UFC, money talks, and Strickland vs Chimaev II is without question the money fight.