The highly anticipated featherweight clash between Brian Ortega and Aljamain Sterling will take place at Saturday’s UFC Fight Night in Shanghai, albeit with a significant change in weight class.<\/p>\n
Ortega (16-4) and Sterling (24-5) will face each other in the lightweight division, with a limit of 155 pounds, after both fighters weighed in at 153 pounds during Friday’s weigh-in.<\/p>\n
The UFC has not revealed the official reason for this change, but it is known that Ortega has had difficulties reaching the featherweight limit of 145 pounds and has considered a permanent category change.<\/p>\n
The fight, scheduled for five rounds, will be the co-main event of UFC Fight Night at the Mercedes-Benz Arena.<\/p>\n
Sterling, former 135-pound champion, moved up to featherweight after losing his title to Sean O’Malley in August 2019. The 36-year-old fighter is seeking a second UFC belt and has a 1-1 record in his new category. His most recent loss was against number one contender, Movsar Evloev, in December.<\/p>\n
Ortega holds a 1-3 record in his last four appearances, although two of those losses were against undisputed or interim champions like Alexander Volkanovski and Yair Rodriguez.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ortega vs. Sterling: Weight Change for the Shanghai Fight The highly anticipated featherweight clash between Brian Ortega and Aljamain Sterling will take place at Saturday’s UFC Fight Night in Shanghai, albeit with a significant change in weight class. Ortega (16-4) and Sterling (24-5) will face each other in the lightweight division, with a limit of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27736,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[4810,4811,2096,228],"class_list":{"0":"post-27735","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-aljamain-sterling","9":"tag-brian-ortega","10":"tag-lightweight","11":"tag-ufc"},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alofokedeportes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alofokedeportes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alofokedeportes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alofokedeportes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alofokedeportes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alofokedeportes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alofokedeportes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alofokedeportes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alofokedeportes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alofokedeportes.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}