Tom Aspinall Vacates UFC Heavyweight Title Amid Chaos
Tom Aspinall has done the unthinkable. Again.
On Sept. 14, 2026, the 33-year-old Englishman quietly vacated his UFC heavyweight title, announcing that the damage to his eyes from Ciryl Gane’s gouges last October at UFC 321 still hasn’t fully healed. He can’t see a date for his return. So he stepped aside.
That’s two lost years in the prime of a heavyweight who should have been headlining every marquee card the UFC could print. One fight in 26 months. Fifteen months waiting on Jon Jones before he even got to Gane. Then a title, an “interim” tag, a promotion, an eye gouge, and now a vacancy.
And somehow, Aspinall still isn’t the strangest part of this division.
A Belt That Won’t Sit Still
Heavyweight right now feels less like a weight class and more like a fever dream.
Names keep morphing. The belt keeps changing hands without ever being properly lost. Every time the picture looks clear, it zooms out again and reveals another layer of madness.
It started in a familiar place.
On March 27, 2021, at UFC 260, Francis Ngannou finally completed his long march to the throne. He flattened Stipe Miocic in their rematch and claimed the lineal UFC heavyweight title. It felt inevitable. Six UFC wins, six finishes, a terrifying aura. The coronation arrived.
Then came the first crack.
The UFC wanted Ngannou to defend against Derrick Lewis at UFC 265, barely four and a half months later. Ngannou wanted more time. The promotion didn’t like that answer. So it invented its favorite fix: an interim belt.
On Aug. 7, 2022, at UFC 265, Ciryl Gane walked into Derrick Lewis’ hometown of Houston and stopped him in the third round. He picked up the interim title, the “lesser” strap, and a unification bout with Ngannou.
That played out on Jan. 22, 2022, at UFC 270. Ngannou, compromised by a knee injury, leaned on wrestling of all things and outworked Gane over five rounds to unify the titles. The champion had evolved mid-reign. The story should have been about greatness.
Instead, it turned into a power struggle.
Dana White, we later learned, was openly rooting against Ngannou. A year later, on Jan. 14, 2023, the UFC stripped Ngannou, waived its one-year matching rights, and watched its lineal heavyweight king walk to the PFL and into boxing. Ngannou then rattled Tyson Fury in his boxing debut and detonated the old combat sports hierarchy.
For UFC fans, one truth remained: the real heavyweight champion had left, and the promotion was now trying to crown a successor without beating him.
Enter Jon Jones, Exit Sanity
With Ngannou gone, the path cleared for the name the UFC had been saving for years.
On March 4, 2023, at UFC 285, Jon Jones finally moved to heavyweight, facing former interim champ Gane for the vacant belt. He needed barely two minutes to choke Gane out with a guillotine and add a second-division title to his résumé.
The UFC had its champion. The asterisks arrived just as quickly.
Jones hadn’t beaten Ngannou. The lineal thread was broken. The belt looked shiny, but the arguments never stopped.
Then the division hit another wall.
Jones was booked to face Miocic on Nov. 11, 2023, at UFC 295 in Madison Square Garden. A torn pectoral muscle ripped him out of the fight. Miocic refused a replacement. The UFC, boxed in again, reached for its favorite crutch: another interim title.
Tom Aspinall versus Sergei Pavlovich. One of them would become the stand-in for the stand-in.
Aspinall needed just 69 seconds. He knocked Pavlovich cold and became the interim champion to Jones’ non-lineal title. The Englishman looked like the future. The label on his belt said “temporary.”
The Interim That Wouldn’t Go Away
The UFC dug in behind Jones. Dana White doubled down on his status as MMA’s GOAT, the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, and defended the long-delayed Jones–Miocic matchup at every turn.
To keep the division from completely freezing, the promotion did something that bordered on parody: it booked an interim title defense.
On July 27, 2024, at UFC 304, Aspinall defended his interim belt against Curtis Blaydes. Interims are supposed to bridge gaps, not build dynasties, but there he was, avenging his only UFC loss by knocking Blaydes out in 60 seconds.
The questions didn’t go away. Blaydes wasn’t Jones. Jones hadn’t beaten Ngannou. The belt stayed blurry.
When Jones finally fought again, it was against a ghost of the past.
On Nov. 16, 2024, at UFC 309, he faced a 42-year-old Miocic at Madison Square Garden, a full year after the matchup’s sell-by date. Jones stopped a diminished Miocic in the third round and retained the heavyweight title, setting up an obvious unification bout with Aspinall.
Obvious to everyone but Jones.
Jones Walks, Then Peeks Back In
Over the next six to eight months, Jones repeated a single refrain: he had no interest in fighting Aspinall. The Englishman, in his view, did nothing for his legacy. While Aspinall waited, Jones toured Vietnam and Thailand, posted about “living my best life,” and treated the heavyweight belt like a souvenir.
The UFC held on as long as it could. Eventually, the calendar forced its hand.
In June 2025, as Aspinall watched his prime leak away, Jones vacated the title and announced his retirement from MMA. The division finally had a clear path. The interim champ could be upgraded, the picture could stabilize.
Then word of a White House lawn event for America’s 250th birthday floated into view, and Jones did what Jones always does: he re-entered the frame.
He wanted back in. He wanted that stage. Maybe against Alex Pereira. Maybe another legacy fight. He lobbied hard. Dana White dismissed the idea as a one-in-a-billion shot.
The belt, though, was already moving on.
Aspinall’s Brief Reign and Gane’s Second Bite
On Oct. 25, 2025, at UFC 321, with Ngannou long gone and Jones out of the picture, the UFC finally stripped away the “interim” tag. Tom Aspinall became the official heavyweight champion.
He hadn’t beaten Ngannou. He hadn’t beaten Jones. The asterisks multiplied. But he was the man with the belt.
To validate that status, the UFC did what it always seems to do when in doubt: it called Ciryl Gane.
The bout in Abu Dhabi was supposed to reboot the division. Instead, late in a competitive first round, Gane’s fingers plunged into Aspinall’s eye sockets. The fight collapsed. The crowd booed. Dana White downplayed the injury.
Aspinall, suddenly forced to defend his own credibility, spent months trying to prove that his eyes were genuinely damaged. The champion’s toughest battle became convincing people he was actually hurt.
While he healed, the UFC went back to the well.
On June 14, 2026, at UFC Freedom 250, with Aspinall sidelined and his title status under dispute, the promotion booked yet another interim heavyweight fight: Gane versus Alex Pereira, the two-division destroyer chasing history as the first man to win UFC titles in three weight classes.
Pereira moved up. Gane met him there. The Frenchman scored a TKO win and collected his second interim belt. The talk, though, fixated on something else entirely — a string of illegal shots to the back of Pereira’s head that marred the finish.
Pereira spent the following months roasting referee Herb Dean. Gane slipped away with another piece of hardware and a ticket to a rematch.
His record at this point read like a legal document. Lineal title fights: 0-1. Non-lineal title fights: 0-1 with one no contest. Interim title fights: 2-0. The man could win everything but the thing that truly counts.
A Division With No Champion and Too Many Champions
Which brings us back to Sept. 14, 2026.
Aspinall, still not fully recovered from the eye gouges, vacated the heavyweight title. The UFC now has to decide whether to simply upgrade Gane — a hugely controversial move — or to put the vacant belt on the line in his next fight, either a do-over with Pereira or a shot against the undefeated, unorthodox Josh Hokit.
Look at the roll call.
Francis Ngannou, the original lineal champion, left without losing his belt in the cage. Jon Jones, the non-lineal champion, retired without ever facing Aspinall or Ngannou. Tom Aspinall, the man who finally inherited the throne, never lost his title either — he gave it up because he couldn’t see.
Three champions. Zero official defeats for the belt. A title that keeps changing hands without ever hitting the canvas.
Right now, the UFC heavyweight strap feels less like a crown and more like contraband, passed hand to hand in the dark, smudged by fingerprints nobody can quite trace.
By the time it’s officially up for grabs again, it might take more than judges to sort it out. It might take forensics.
