Cris Cyborg is lobbying again for a rematch with Amanda Nunes, and the honest answer is this: it should have happened in 2019 or 2020, and it's dead now. The UFC bears the blame here. Cyborg has spent the better part of a decade publicly begging for the fight. The UFC held all the leverage, and it spent that leverage burning the whole thing down.
Start with what actually happened in the cage. On December 29, 2018 at UFC 232, Amanda Nunes needed 51 seconds to knock out Cyborg and become the first female two-division champion in UFC history, ending a 13-year unbeaten run. That's real, and it's the strongest argument against any rematch: Nunes was faster and sharper, and she finished the fight almost before it started. Anyone telling you a do-over flips automatically is selling you nostalgia. Nunes beat her convincingly the first time.
A bad loss, though, is exactly the kind of thing rematches get built around. Rematches after knockouts are the oldest business in combat sports, and both women were box office. The second fight never happened because of what came after, and it would have sold out whenever it was booked.
Cyborg finished her UFC run on a win, a lopsided decision over Felicia Spencer at UFC 240 in July 2019. She was sharp, still taking hard fights, nowhere near washed up. Then the relationship fell apart. Dana White announced he'd release her and wouldn't match any outside offers, framing it publicly as Cyborg chasing easier paydays elsewhere. Cyborg's camp called that a smear and said the UFC never put a fair deal in front of her. Both sides have their own version of events, and neither has opened the books. The outcome is what matters: the promoter had the power to keep his signature featherweight in-house and chose to let her walk out the door in the middle of a grudge.
Then came the part that ended it for good. When Nunes retired in June 2023 after beating Irene Aldana, White was asked if the women's featherweight division was finished, and he said the answer was "probably" yes. The UFC had already dissolved the 145-pound class earlier that year, and White has since been blunt that he isn't adding weight classes for anybody. There's no featherweight title left in the UFC, no division to host the one fight fans actually wanted. The weight class Cyborg built got shut down the moment it stopped having a champion worth promoting.
The real failure here is institutional. A promotion built a division around one singular attraction, got the superfight it wanted, then let the star walk and quietly erased the division she'd competed in instead of protecting what it had built. Cyborg's exit was ugly on both ends, and her camp burned its share of bridges too. But matchmakers control weight classes. The UFC made sure there's nothing left to host a rematch in.
Fans were owed this fight. It isn't happening. Cyborg says she's gone 18-0 across MMA and boxing since that night, and she's been drifting toward the ring for a while now. Nunes is 38 and back purely at bantamweight, where she headlines against Kayla Harrison at UFC 334 on November 14 after roughly three and a half years away from competition. Cyborg has never made the true 135-pound limit in her career; her closest brushes were a pair of 140-pound catchweights back in 2016. There's no weight left where they'd even meet, and no promoter willing to build a stage for it. A rematch now would be a curiosity, years past the event it could have been.
So when Cyborg writes that the fans have always deserved Cyborg-Nunes 2, she's right. They did. The people who could have delivered it decided a grudge and a spreadsheet mattered more than the one fight the division existed to produce.
