Yan Xiaonan vs Denise Gomes: five spots, one coin flip
Yan Xiaonan vs Denise Gomes predictions for UFC Shanghai: the No. 4 strawweight returns after 504 days and the market prices her barely ahead of No. 9.
UFC Fight Night: Nurmagomedov vs Song goes Saturday, August 29 from the Oriental Sports Center in Pudong, Shanghai. Prelims at 07:00 UTC, main card at 10:00 UTC, which is 3:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. Eastern. Paramount+ has it in the United States, Migu in China, and the rest is on our how to watch page. Set the coffee maker the night before.
The co-main is the fight I keep rewinding in my head, and it is not because of the main event's shadow. It is because the market and the rankings are telling two different stories about it, and only one of them can be right.
Yan Xiaonan is ranked fourth at strawweight. Denise Gomes is ranked ninth. Five spots. The line, across 24 books, is Yan at -156 and Gomes at +129.
That is a coin flip with a lean. For a five-spot ranking gap in a division where the top five have all fought for a belt or come within one win of it, the market is saying something fairly blunt: it does not think those five spots mean what they used to.
What the ranking is built on, and when
Yan's fourth-place spot is real and it was earned. She beat Claudia Gadelha, Karolina Kowalkiewicz, Mackenzie Dern over five rounds in a majority decision, and knocked out Jessica Andrade in the first round in May 2023. That Andrade knockout got her a title shot against Zhang Weili in April 2024, which she lost over five rounds.
Since that title fight she is 1-1: a decision over Tabatha Ricci in November 2024, then a unanimous decision loss to Virna Jandiroba on April 12, 2025. Over her last five she is 2-3.
The Jandiroba fight is the last time anybody saw her compete. Saturday will be 504 days later. She turned 37 in June.
I am not going to pretend I can tell you what 504 days does to a 37 year old strawweight, because I cannot, and neither can anybody who says they can. What I can tell you is what the layoff removes: Yan's whole game is volume and pace, and volume and pace are the first things that go stale. In thirteen UFC fights she has thrown 2,030 significant strikes and landed 916 of them. That is 45.1 percent accuracy, which is a perfectly good number attached to an enormous workload. Nobody in this division out-works her when she is sharp.
Gomes is not a step down
Here is the part the ranking gap hides.
Denise Gomes is 26 years old and on a four-fight win streak: a split decision over Eduarda Moura in June 2024, a unanimous decision over Karolina Kowalkiewicz that November, a second-round knockout of Elise Reed in May 2025, and a unanimous decision over Tecia Pennington last November. She has not lost since Angela Hill outpointed her in November 2023.
In eight UFC fights she has landed 356 of 692 significant strikes. That is 51.4 percent, more than six points above Yan's career mark, on roughly a third of the volume. She has three knockdowns to Yan's two, in five fewer fights. And the number that surprised me most: 1,609 seconds of control time in eight fights against Yan's 951 in thirteen.
Gomes controls people for 3 minutes 21 seconds per fight. Yan manages 1 minute 13. If this becomes a grappling fight, and Gomes has shown she is willing to make it one, the younger woman is the one with the recent evidence.
She also has ten takedowns to Yan's eleven, again in five fewer appearances.
The case for Yan anyway
I keep talking myself into Gomes and then remembering who Yan has actually shared a cage with.
Gomes' best win is Kowalkiewicz, who was 39 on the night and a long way from the version that fought for the belt in 2016. Yan's list runs Gadelha, Dern, Andrade, Ricci, and five rounds with a champion who is currently ranked first in the division. There is a level gap here that the numbers above genuinely cannot see, because the numbers do not know that Gomes has never been in with anybody in the top five and Yan has beaten several of them.
The reach is 63 inches each, so nobody is fighting long. Yan is three inches taller at 65. Both are orthodox. On a clean night, with a full camp behind her, Yan out-jabs Gomes for fifteen minutes and it is not especially close.
The problem is the phrase "on a clean night" is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence, and 504 days is a long time to assume one.
The pick
I have flipped on this three times while writing and I am going to land on the side I like least, which is usually the sign that it is the right one.
Gomes is 26, has won four straight, controls opponents for nearly three times as long per fight, and lands at a higher clip. Yan is 37, has lost three of five, and has not competed since April of last year. The market has already moved most of the way there and I think it has a little further to go.
Prediction: Denise Gomes by unanimous decision.
For what it is worth, I would rather be wrong about this one. Yan Xiaonan fighting in front of a Shanghai crowd, sixteen months after her last fight, at 37, is exactly the kind of night this sport occasionally hands to the fighter who deserves it. The full card, odds, and running order are on the event page.