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Official UFC rankings — the 2021 archive

Middleweight rankings, 2021

Where the Middleweight 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 Middleweight rankings are one click away.

The official UFC rankings, taken from ufc.com. 41 published tables in 2021, 18 January 2021 to 20 December 2021. These are the UFC’s own tables, week by week — we did not invent them and we do not reorder them. Names link to our fighter pages where we hold one; a ranked fighter we have no page for is printed as plain text rather than dropped.

How 2021 finished

The last Middleweight 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.

The UFC’s published ranking table of 20 December 2021
RankFighterOn the year
ChampionCIsrael Adesanya—
1Robert Whittaker—
2Marvin Vettori↑3
3Jared Cannonier—
4Derek Brunson↑3
5Paulo Costa↓3
6Jack Hermansson—
7Sean StricklandNEW
8Darren Till↓4
9Uriah Hall—
10Kelvin Gastelum↓2
11Brad Tavares↑3
12Nassourdine ImavovNEW
13Andre MunizNEW
14Kevin Holland↓4
15Chris Weidman↓4

A ranking here is a ranking the UFC published on that date, not our order and not a re-run of it.

What changed in 2021

Measured between the last table of 2020 on the record (21 December 2020) and the last table of 2021 (20 December 2021).

The champion line

  • 21 December 2020 · the year opens with Israel Adesanya in the champion line
  • No change: the same fighter held the champion line on every table the UFC published for this division in the year.

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.

Middleweight rankings, year by year

A year gets a page here only where the UFC published at least 10 Middleweight 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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