Mica Galvao will attempt to make his first Who’s Number One welterweight title-defense against Kody Steele at WNO 21 on November 30th, 2023. He’s only been one of the promotion’s champions for a matter of weeks and he’s already taking on the next challenge in his career. He won his title by defeating both Jacob Rodriguez and PJ Barch at WNO 20: Night of Champions, and he registered one of the most impressive finishes of the entire event when he hit a beautiful flying armbar to submit PJ Barch in less than a minute.
Galvao has been one of the top prospects in his weight class for quite some time and he’s been unfortunate to narrowly miss out on two of the biggest titles in the sport already. He had to settle for a silver medal at ADCC 2022 and although he did win an IBJJF World Championship, his status as the youngest champion in the promotion’s history was very short-lived. It lasted less than a year in fact, as Galvao was stripped of his title due to failing a PEDs test after the event.
That meant that the performance Mica Galvao gave at Who’s Number One 20: Night of Champions marked the biggest accomplishment of his career so far, and Kody Steele is a great challenger for his first title-defense. He’s a phenomenal wrestler and elite BJJ competitor, although he’s been focusing much more on his professional MMA career lately. While that might mean that Steele has spent more time working on his striking in recent months, he’s no doubt going to throw himself back into grappling full-time to prepare for this title-shot. The high pace that both Steele and Galvao can maintain from start to finish will mean that this should be an action-packed match and it’s hard to imagine it going to the end of regulation time without one of these men finding the finish.
FloGrappling announced that Mica Galvao was going to make his first welterweight title-defense against Kody Steele at WNO 21 in a recent post to their official Instagram account:
