UFC champion Justin Gaethje not interested in Paddy Pimblett rematch

Justin Gaethje was happy to inspire Paddy Pimblett but that doesn’t mean they’re going to meet again

Justin Gaethje is still weighing his options when it comes to his next fight, but don’t expect him to just immediately sign onto a rematch against Paddy Pimblett.

Prior to his stunning performance to dethrone Ilia Topuria at the UFC White House card, Gaethje first had to dispatch Pimblett in an interim title fight back in January. Despite his underdog status, Gaethje put on another classic performance as he battered Pimblett on the feet before ultimately winning a unanimous decision.

But this past weekend at UFC 329, Pimblett stole the show with his lightning quick submission win over Benoit Saint Denis and it put him right back in the title race again. But considering he just beat Pimblett six months ago, Gaethje doesn’t sound all that interested in crossing paths with him again so soon.

“Destined for each other to fight again? No,” Gaethje told Pat McAfee about Pimblett on Wednesday.

That said, Gaethje respects all the kind words that Pimblett said about him during fight week, especially the inspiration he received watching his win over Topuria back in June.

Pimblett admitted that he was struggling in the immediate aftermath of his loss to Gaethje but witnessing that performance against Topuria really changed his perspective on things. Despite losing, Pimblett managed to go all five rounds with Gaethje in a potential Fight of the Year candidate.

Gaethje appreciates that his upset win over Topuria has resonated so loudly with athletes across numerous sports.

“I think it’s crazy what my story has done for so many people,” Gaethje said. “Rafael Fiziev, a guy I fought two times, says a very similar thing. I kind of rejuvenated him when I won that fight. Him losing two times to me, having been in there with me two times kind of rejuvenated him. Anthony Joshua, I saw him talking about how you can never forget how real fighting is and how dangerous it is and never becoming too full of yourself. He learned that from that lesson.

“It’s pretty cool across the board, all athletes respect our sport because it’s so humbling, so primal. It’s one on one. It’s freaking awesome.”

As for his own career, Gaethje previously stated that he expects to fight again after potentially contemplating retirement but he’s not likely to return to action until sometime in 2027.

Two reasons to skip the rematch

Gaethje beat Pimblett on the scorecards in January and has since taken the title from Ilia Topuria. His reluctance to revisit the first fight has support in the record on two separate counts.

Rematches usually confirm. Of 11,364 pairings in the archive that met more than once, the second meeting repeated the first result 67.4% of the time and reversed it 32.6%. A champion agreeing to a rematch is accepting a one-in-three chance of losing something he already won, in exchange for very little he does not already have.

And lightweight is the division that hides least. Across 86,414 archived bouts at 155 pounds:

Lightweight is the most evenly balanced division in the archive — submissions and knockouts within two-tenths of a point of each other, and more than a quarter of fights still reaching the judges. There is no dominant path to victory at 155, which is another way of saying there is no safe fight.

For a champion weighing options, a rematch against a man he has already beaten combines the highest-confidence outcome in the sport with the least forgiving division in it.

Method: figures drawn from the MMAHIT fight archive of 1,049,038 recorded bouts across 347,296 fighters, events dated December 1963 to May 2026. Each bout is stored once per corner and has been de-duplicated. Draws and no-contests are excluded from win-rate calculations. Division is taken from the weight class recorded on each fighter's profile. A rematched pairing is counted once, and meetings that ended in a draw or no-contest are excluded from the reversal rate.