Brando Pericic (6-1)
Heavyweight – 31 Years Old – City Kickboxing
The UFC’s heavyweight division has a problem that almost everyone in the sport openly acknowledges: it is short on athletes. Not fighters, not big men who can punch hard, but genuine athletes with movement, timing, versatility and the physical tools to do things at 265 pounds that most people in that weight class simply cannot do. This scarcity highlights a gap in the division. Which is precisely why Brando Pericic has arrived at exactly the right time. He has arrived in exactly the right way.
Born in Adelaide, Australia, and proudly representing his Croatian heritage, the 31-year-old has been called “The Balkan Bear” – a nickname that captures the physicality but perhaps undersells the athleticism that makes him such an intriguing prospect at heavyweight. Standing at 6’5″ with a 79-inch reach, Pericic has a physical profile that most heavyweights would envy. However, what separates him from the typical hulking puncher in that weight class is the way he moves, adapts and finishes fights in different ways. All six of his professional wins have come by knockout or submission – a 100% finishing rate – and he has not needed to go past the first round in any of his last four fights.
Pericic was not always certain of his path in MMA. According to a UFC feature ahead of his UFC London appearance, he had at one point been on the verge of walking away from the sport entirely after struggling to get bookings and find his footing. Everything changed when former middleweight champion Israel Adesanya invited him to City Kickboxing in Auckland, New Zealand, to help prepare for a camp. What began as a training stint became a permanent home. As a result, the effect on Pericic’s development has been obvious. Training alongside the likes of Adesanya and the broader City Kickboxing stable transformed him from a powerful, rough-around-the-edges prospect into a much more composed, technically sharper fighter. He arrived at the UFC with a clear identity and, just as importantly, a belief in himself.
His professional record before the UFC carried one loss, to Randall Rayment, a fighter who was quicker and more agile on the ground, more experienced and managed to manoeuvre around Pericic in ways that exposed some of the gaps in his grappling at the time. It was a loss Pericic learned enormously from. Importantly, it came in the context of an early career where he was not shying away from difficult fights. His opening bouts against Ricky Biechun and Kelvin Fitial demonstrated an appetite for competition. In addition, taking on Rayment showed he was not simply cherry-picking opponents. There are those who might nitpick the two wins over debutants that followed the Rayment loss. However, the honest reality of fighting at heavyweight regionally is that opponents are genuinely hard to find. Heavyweights are not exactly queuing up for fights in the Australian regional scene. As a result, getting any sort of active competition is a challenge in of itself. The debutant wins were a product of circumstance, not of a carefully managed record.
Since arriving in the UFC, Pericic has been nothing short of sensational. He made his debut at UFC Perth in September 2025, dispatching Elisha Ellison in under two minutes with the kind of clinical brutality that immediately marks someone as worth paying attention to. He went to London in March 2026 and did the same thing to Louie Sutherland – using his height, reach and the combination of knees and ground-and-pound that City Kickboxing has sharpened into a genuine system – to earn another first-round TKO at the O2 Arena in just 1:48. Two UFC fights. Two first-round knockouts. Combined fight time of 3 minutes and 43 seconds. The callout after the Sutherland win said everything about his ambition. He wants Perth, he wants the top 15, and he wants anyone willing to step in front of him.
Now he has his stiffest test yet. Shamil Gaziev comes into this fight ranked at No. 13 in the heavyweight division and represents a meaningful step up in competition from what Pericic has faced so far in the UFC. Gaziev is a legitimate threat, a first-round finisher himself who arrived via the Contender Series and has mixed it with UFC-level heavyweights. He is coming off a stoppage loss of his own, and this is a fight that carries real risk and real reward for both men. For Pericic, it is the fight that separates the genuinely promising from the genuinely dangerous. A dominant performance here, and the top 10 is not just possible – it is the immediate next stop. In addition, a title conversation could come into view not long after that. He has said as much himself: “I want to fight Pereira, Gane, Aspinall, everybody. I’m here to make a legacy.” In a division crying out for fresh, athletic talent with finishing ability and elite coaching behind them, Brando Pericic looks very much like the answer to a question the heavyweight division has been asking for some time.
