Rei Tsuruya vs Kevin Borjas: two men Joshua Van already beat

There is a fight buried on the Shanghai prelims on Saturday morning that nobody is going to write about, so I am going to write about it.

Rei Tsuruya fights Kevin Borjas at flyweight, second from the top of the prelims on a card headlined by Umar Nurmagomedov and Song Yadong. Tsuruya is 11-1. Borjas is 11-5. Neither is ranked, and on the broadcast it will get four minutes of build.

What makes it worth finding is the one thing the two men have in common. Both of them have gone fifteen minutes with Joshua Van, and both of them lost.

Van holds the flyweight title as of Tuesday's ranking snapshot. Twenty different fighters carry a loss to him in our fighter history data. Saturday is the second time in 2026 that two of the twenty have been booked against each other, after Édgar Cháirez and Felipe Bunes on February 28. It is not a common thing, and it is a genuinely useful thing, because the two performances are sixteen months apart and the comparison runs straight through the current champion.

Borjas got his fifteen minutes first, at UFC 295 in November 2023, unanimous decision. Tsuruya got his at UFC 313 in March 2025, also a unanimous decision, and it remains the only loss of his professional career.

What Tsuruya was before that night

Tsuruya is 24 years old. He has been competing since he was fifteen, when he won a unanimous decision over Go Utsunomiya at the 24th All Japan Amateur Shooto Championships in September 2017.

The professional record that follows is unusually clean, and it was built entirely inside the Japanese circuit before the UFC ever saw it:

Six professional fights, six finishes, four of them in the first round, across DEEP and Pancrase in under two years. Then Road to UFC: Ronal Siahaan by second-round submission in May 2023, Mark Climaco by unanimous decision in August 2023, Jiniushiyue by first-round TKO in February 2024. He won the bracket and the contract.

The headline number is that nine of his eleven professional wins are finishes. The more interesting one is that only two are not, and both of those were against opposition the UFC selected for him rather than opposition he found on the Japanese regionals.

Then the champion

His UFC record now reads: unanimous decision over Carlos Hernandez at UFC 303 in June 2024, unanimous decision loss to Van at UFC 313, first-round submission of Luis Gurule on May 30 of this year.

The Van fight is the one that defines his standing, and the honest reading gets better every month. Our ranking snapshots have Van sitting at number 15 in the flyweight division on the day he beat Tsuruya. He was 14th by late March, first by July 1, and champion by the snapshot of December 9, 2025. Tsuruya lost fifteen minutes to the 15th-ranked flyweight in the world, and that man had the belt nine months later. That is a different sentence from "he lost," and the difference matters when you are 24 and being placed on a card.

What followed it is the part I keep coming back to. Tsuruya did not fight again for 448 days. March 8, 2025 to May 30, 2026: fourteen and a half months on the shelf at the exact age where a flyweight prospect is supposed to be fighting three times a year. Our data records the gap, not the reason for it, and I am not going to invent one. But the cost of it is measurable in the other man's climb. Van went from 15th to champion in the time Tsuruya spent waiting for a phone call, and Tsuruya has had exactly one fight in that entire span.

He won that one in a round, by submission, over Luis Gurule in Macau. Then the UFC turned him around in three months and put him in Shanghai.

Why Borjas is the right test and the wrong reward

Borjas is 28, out of Peru, 11-5, and he is the most-referenced fighter on this card whether or not anybody says his name on the broadcast. He has fought three other flyweights booked on Saturday: he beat André Lima by unanimous decision in June, he lost to Sumudaerji by unanimous decision at the last UFC card in this city in August 2025, and he beat Nilson Rojas by unanimous decision back in 2018 on a Peruvian regional card. Add the Van fight and Borjas has now been in with the champion and half of the flyweight bloc the promotion flew to China.

That is exactly the kind of opponent you want if what you are trying to do is grade a prospect. Borjas does not get finished easily. Not one of his five career losses came in the first round. Three ended in round two and two went to the scorecards. He is a known quantity measured repeatedly against other known quantities, which is what makes a result against him legible.

It is also, and I want to be plain about this, a bad reward. Tsuruya is 24, he is 11-1, his only loss is to the champion, and he has fought once in seventeen months. What he needs is a ranked opponent or a fast track. What he has is a prelim slot against an 11-5 gatekeeper on prelims that open at 3:00 a.m. Eastern, on a card where the promotion has stacked four flyweight fights and can only promote one of them.

There is a version of the flyweight division where a 24-year-old with nine finishes in eleven wins and a competitive loss to the champion is a project the promotion protects. There is another version where he is one of eight men in the same weight class on the same card, and the ones who lose get sorted out on a Saturday morning.

We are going to find out which version this is in the second-to-last fight before the main card, while America sleeps through it.