Cage Warriors 213: how Nik Bagley beats Bruno Souza

Nik Bagley defends the Cage Warriors featherweight title against Bruno Souza on Saturday, November 14, in the main event of Cage Warriors 213 at BBC Studioworks Television Centre in London. The first bell is 7:00 p.m. GMT (2:00 p.m. ET).

The lazy read on this fight goes like this: Souza has been to the UFC, Souza trains out of Machida Karate Academy, Souza went 3-3 in six Karate Combat bouts between 2022 and 2024, so Souza is the better striker, so Souza is the problem. Half of that is true. He probably is the better striker. It just isn't the fight Bagley has any interest in having, and his record says he hasn't had to have it in a long time.

Bagley (9-1), 29, has seven submissions in nine wins, six of them in Cage Warriors, and he has won seven straight since his only loss, a unanimous decision against Ben Ellis at Cage Warriors 134 in March 2022. So let's look at how the champion actually wins, and where Souza's game gives him the door.

The takedown is the jab

Most fighters treat the takedown as a change of scenery. Bagley treats it as the opening line of a sentence that ends in a tap. Across the four of his Cage Warriors fights with tracked stats, he landed 7 of 10 takedowns, and the numbers after the takedown are the real story:

Read the Bakkes row again. The fight lasted 4:19 and Bagley controlled 4:12 of it. Bakkes landed one significant strike all night. Against Lopes, a fight that went the full 15 minutes, Bagley spent 12:58 in control and Lopes landed 8 significant strikes to Bagley's 136. That is not a man winning exchanges. That is a man deleting them.

Look at where those fights happened. The tracked stats put the Bakkes fight at distance for 20 seconds in total, and the Shelley fight for 26. Everything else was clinch and mat, with Bagley on top. Bagley's best defense against a striker is that the striker never gets a striker's fight.

He has done the long version too

The knock on submission specialists is that they fade or get frustrated when the first shot doesn't land. Bagley has answered that twice in title fights. He won the title over Solomon Simon at Cage Warriors 200 in February by unanimous decision after five full rounds, 25 minutes of grinding with no finish to bail him out. Then in his first defense, against Aiden Lee at Cage Warriors 208 in June, he found the submission at 3:18 of the third round.

That matters here because Souza does not get finished often. He has been stopped once in 20 pro MMA fights. Which brings us to the challenger.

Souza wants the room, and he has lost when he didn't get it

Souza (16-4), 30, is a distance fighter in the purest sense. Of his 16 MMA wins, 11 came by decision, three of them split. He has one knockout win in his entire pro career, a second-round TKO of Guilherme Santos at LFA 95 in November 2020. His career runs on landing more than the other guy at range and making the judges agree.

When he gets that range, he's good at it. In his one Cage Warriors appearance, a unanimous decision over Wilson Reis at Cage Warriors 173 in June 2024, he outlanded Reis 46 to 24 in significant strikes, and the tracked stats put the fight at distance for 810 of its 900 seconds. Reis landed 1 of 3 takedowns and still knocked Souza down once. Souza got the decision anyway, because the fight was where he wanted it.

His UFC run is where the cracks show. He went 0-2, unanimous decisions to Melsik Baghdasaryan at UFC 268 in November 2021 and Luis Saldaña in March 2022. In the UFC he landed 3.73 significant strikes a minute and absorbed 5.30, with 46 percent striking defense. Saldaña landed 29 of 37 leg kicks on him and took him down twice in five tries. Souza's UFC takedown defense finished at 60 percent: four of every ten attempts on him got him to the floor. Against a fighter like Bagley, who only needs one to start the clock, that number is the whole fight.

His most recent loss is a warning too. Ernie Juarez stopped him by TKO at 4:56 of the second round at A1 Combat 34 in March, the only stoppage loss on his MMA record. He has rebuilt since with two unanimous decisions, over Amin Almelik in May and Shane Torres in July, both wins at range, both on the regional circuit.

How Bagley wins

1. Close the distance behind pressure, not a shot from the outside. Souza is 5-foot-10 with a 70-inch reach, two inches longer than Bagley on both counts, and a karate stance is built to punish the long, telegraphed double leg. So Bagley should not shoot from the outside. He needs to walk Souza to the fence and get his hands on him, eating a kick or two on the way if that is the price.
2. Make the first takedown count. Souza's best wins are 15-minute fights at range, and his tracked fights show almost nothing of him working from underneath. Bagley's control numbers (12:58 against Lopes) say that once he is on top, he stays there.
3. Don't chase the tap from a bad spot. Souza has been submitted zero times in 20 pro MMA fights. If the first choke isn't there, Bagley's Simon fight is the template: stay heavy, win the round, and let the volume of control do what it did for five rounds in February.

How Souza spoils it

The prescription for the challenger is simple to write and brutal to execute. Stay off the fence, circle out, kick the legs Bagley needs to drive off of (Saldaña showed exactly how much damage that does), and make every clinch entry cost a counter. If Souza can keep this fight at distance for anything like the 810 seconds he got against Reis, he becomes the first man since Ellis to beat Bagley on the cards.

I just don't see how he keeps it there. Every opponent in Bagley's tracked Cage Warriors fights was taken down, and three of the four were submitted inside two rounds. Souza's best skill is space. Bagley's entire career has been about taking it away.

Make your call on the Cage Warriors 213 pick'em, and the full card and broadcast details are in our Cage Warriors 213 start times guide.