Where the Men's Pound-for-Pound division stood when 2021 finished, taken from the 41 ranking tables the UFC published for it that year. This is the archive, not today’s table — the current Men's Pound-for-Pound rankings are one click away.
The last Men's Pound-for-Pound table the UFC published in 2021, dated 20 December 2021. The right-hand column is the change since 21 December 2020 — the table this page measures the year from.
| Rank | Fighter | On the year |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kamaru Usman | ↑4 |
| 2 | Alexander Volkanovski | ↑4 |
| 3 | Israel Adesanya | — |
| 4 | Francis Ngannou | ↑10 |
| 5 | Charles Oliveira | NEW |
| 6 | Jon Jones | ↓4 |
| 7 | Max Holloway | ↑1 |
| 8 | Dustin Poirier | ↓1 |
| 9 | Stipe Miocic | ↓5 |
| 10 | Brandon Moreno | NEW |
| 11 | Petr Yan | ↓1 |
| 12 | Glover Teixeira | NEW |
| 13 | Robert Whittaker | — |
| 14 | Jan Błachowicz | ↑1 |
| 15 | Ciryl Gane | NEW |
A ranking here is a ranking the UFC published on that date, not our order and not a re-run of it.
Measured between the last table of 2020 on the record (21 December 2020) and the last table of 2021 (20 December 2021).
There is no pound-for-pound belt, so this table has no champion line to change — the UFC publishes it as a numbered list only, and so do we. What moves here is opinion across every division at once.
Entering and leaving are counted across the whole published table, the champion line included, so a fighter who won the belt during the year is not double-counted as having left the numbered places. The number beside each name is where they sat on the table that names them. Movement inside the year that had reversed itself by December is not counted here — the division page’s week-by-week slider is where every table in between lives.
A year gets a page here only where the UFC published at least 10 Men's Pound-for-Pound tables in it. A year with three or four tables in it is the year a division opened or closed, and a “what changed this year” section built on three weeks in December would be titled as something it is not.
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