According to UFC president Dana White, it might not be too long before fans of Kayla Harrison get to see her plying her trade in the world’s premier MMA promotion. It’s been quite a long time coming, but Harrison has managed to build up her reputation over the years and has managed to develop from a two-time Olympic gold medalist Judoka in to a full-fledged MMA world champion. Aside from a single Featherweight fight at Invicta FC 43, Harrison has spent the rest of her twelve-fight undefeated professional MMA career competing at Lightweight for PFL and has done phenomenal work for the promotion during her tenure.
She rattled off three finishes in her first year at the promotion before she took part in one of their championship seasons, finishing two of her four opponents and winning the PFL women’s Lightweight championship for the first time. 2021 went even better for Harrison as she finished all four of her opponents in her second championship-winning season and only her fellow finalist Taylor Guardado even managed to make it out of the first round against her.
It’s these kinds of amazing performances that attracted the attention of the UFC and earlier this year, White said that he was interested in bringing her on board. As is standard practice for the UFC CEO, he changed his mind seemingly overnight about Kayla Harrison and began putting down her achievements which naturally attracted criticism from PFL founder Donn Davis. Regardless, Harrison understood that anything that White said was purely intended to be a promotional tactic and she revealed prior to winning her second PFL title that it was going to take a life-changing amount of money to keep her fighting there.
With all of this in mind, White’s recent comments make it seem as though Harrison’s transition to the UFC is almost a foregone conclusion. The conversation with Dana White where he confirmed that he was in talks to sign Kayla Harrison to the UFC was initially reported by Aaron Bronsteter in a post to his official Twitter account:
Just spoke to Dana White and he confirmed that the UFC are having conversations with Kayla Harrison's team.
He believes that there is only one way to find out whether Harrison can be considered the best in the world and that's for her to join the UFC and face Amanda Nunes.
— Aaron Bronsteter (@aaronbronsteter) December 8, 2021
