Rico Verhoeven is upping the ante on his challenge to Francis Ngannou. He doesn\u2019t want to fight \u201cThe Predator\u201d once, he wants to fight him three times across three combat sports.<\/p>\n
The Glory kickboxing heavyweight champion has been pushing for a fight with Ngannou<\/a> for nearly a year, and now believes he\u2019s figured out a way to make their rivalry one of the most exciting things in fighting right now.<\/p>\n \u201cLet\u2019s think outside the box, what hasn\u2019t been done before?\u201d Verhoeven said on a recent Ariel Helwani show. \u201cThe ultimate challenge: one opponent, three fights, three disciplines.<\/p>\n Verhoeven\u2019s idea is to fight Ngannou three times, each fight in a different sport: mixed martial arts, kickboxing, and boxing.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve done three fights in one night, but to make it good, to make it exciting, and make it like a full camp, it\u2019s important to have three different moments … We got the right opponent … We gotta find the right organization, the right person to organize it and make it happen.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n Verhoeven insists there\u2019s interest from promoters in all three sports.<\/p>\n \u201cGlory\u2019s interested. [PFL], I think so. And Saudi\u2019s interested. So I think there\u2019s a lot of things that might happen and just change combat sports in general. We\u2019re driving in a car, and you\u2019re driving on the highway. Why pick a lane? Why pick one lane when you can own the whole highway? You can do all three. Why not? Let\u2019s just do all three.\u201d<\/p>\n Ngannou hasn\u2019t fought since an October 2024 win over Renan Ferreira in MMA. Before that, he lost his two debut boxing matches to Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua. The Fury fight was shockingly close … the Joshua fight not so much \u2014 a second round knockout in favor of \u201cAJ.\u201d<\/p>\n Currently it seems like Saudi boxing power broker Turki Alalshikh is contemplating a Francis Ngannou vs. Deontay Wilder fight.<\/a> Wilder just won a tune up<\/a> last weekend against Tyrrell Anthony Herndon via 7th round TKO (watch it here),<\/a> but the performance wasn\u2019t the sort that makes you think he\u2019s ready for a return to top level competition. That could play in Ngannou\u2019s favor, or could make Alalshikh pass on the fight entirely.<\/p>\n Either way, Verhoeven is ready to go.<\/p>\n \u201cIf somebody says, \u2018Yo, I want this and I want this real fast,\u2019 let\u2019s go,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m down. I\u2019ve done it all. Let\u2019s create moments and things that haven\u2019t been done before.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rico Verhoeven is upping the ante on his challenge to Francis Ngannou. He doesn\u2019t want to fight \u201cThe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":235191,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4108],"tags":[9988,1935,18648,21808,10175,3576,163,91984,256,1501,35380,18647,56350,91983,12863,79,16,15,91982],"class_list":{"0":"post-235190","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-against","9":"tag-boxing","10":"tag-com","11":"tag-combat","12":"tag-fight","13":"tag-for","14":"tag-front-page","15":"tag-glory-k1-kickboxing-news","16":"tag-in","17":"tag-latest-news","18":"tag-makes","19":"tag-mmamania","20":"tag-ngannou","21":"tag-pitch","22":"tag-series","23":"tag-sports","24":"tag-uk","25":"tag-united-kingdom","26":"tag-verhoeven"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114790316522500692","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}