Here's the number that should give the UFC's matchmakers pause before they pencil Kelvin Gastelum onto another card: more than ten. That's how many fights he's had canceled inside the promotion, across middleweight and welterweight. The latest is his scheduled September 12 meeting with Yousri Belgaroui at Noche UFC in Glendale, Arizona. No official reason has been given for the withdrawal. Djorden Santos, who has a 1-2 UFC record, steps in on short notice.
Fair's fair, though. Gastelum isn't solely to blame for a decade of scratched bookings. Plenty of them collapsed on the other side of the cage: opponents pulling out, visa problems, the ordinary chaos of scheduling that treats every fight card as a rough draft until the cage door actually closes. When his January 2023 date with Nassourdine Imavov fell through, it was Gastelum who withdrew with a mouth injury, but the pair's earlier scheduled meeting had already fallen apart over Imavov's visa issues. Nobody dodges a visa office on purpose.
This isn't a character indictment. Gastelum has shown up to fight plenty of times over a long career, he won The Ultimate Fighter, and he once challenged for the interim middleweight title. This is about probability, and about how the UFC spends its most valuable resource: a confirmed spot on a card fans are actually buying tickets for.
Look at the Gastelum-side withdrawals alone and a pattern takes shape. He pulled out of a short-notice UFC 273 matchup with Dricus du Plessis in April 2022 with an undisclosed injury, telling reporters he'd been instructed not to name it so future opponents couldn't target it. He withdrew from that Imavov booking with a mouth injury. In 2023 he was set to return at welterweight against Shavkat Rakhmonov, only to break down in training with a facial fracture, later sharing footage of the injury himself. At the time, that Rakhmonov cancellation was already his fifth in ten booked fights. That was years ago. The tally's only grown since.
And it isn't strictly injuries, either. At UFC 205 in 2016 he missed weight so badly the fight with Donald Cerrone was scrapped outright and he was suspended for it. Different failure, same result for everyone who bought a ticket: no fight.
One wrinkle is worth being precise about. The Belgaroui bout wasn't a headline slot, it sat on the preliminary card. So the pitch that the UFC should stop putting Gastelum in "high-profile" positions needs a small correction: this particular booking already wasn't one. But that almost strengthens the case rather than weakening it, because even from the undercard, his exit forced a scramble. Belgaroui, a 6-foot-5 former kickboxer who'd gone 2-0 in the Octagon, loses a recognizable name and inherits a short-notice replacement. Santos arrives with a rocky ledger: he came through the Contender Series past Will Currie, dropped a narrow one to Ozzy Diaz, rebounded against Danny Barlow, and most recently got caught in a third-round rear-naked choke by Baisangur Susurkaev in May. That's a reasonable fill-in, but it's a downgrade in draw, and it lands on the card because the man they planned around wasn't there again.
My take is simple. The UFC doesn't need to cut Gastelum or freeze him out. It needs to price his unreliability into how it books him. Stop building anything load-bearing around his name. Don't sell a card on him, don't slot him where his absence reshapes the co-main or headline picture, and treat any Gastelum booking as a bonus if it survives to fight night, not a foundation. A fighter can be genuinely good and still be a bad bet to actually walk out. Those aren't in conflict. The matchmaking just has to admit both are true at once.
None of this is a wish for him to disappear. When Gastelum fights, he's usually worth the ticket. The problem is the gap between when he fights and when he's booked, and at more than ten cancellations that gap has stopped being bad luck and started being a planning assumption. Belgaroui and Santos will sort out September 12 without him. The next time the promotion writes his name on a card, it ought to write it in pencil.
