Can Deiveson Figueiredo Entertain Fans Again Like He Did in 2020?

There was a stretch, call it the eighteen months between February 2020 and the summer of 2021, where Deiveson Figueiredo was, pound for pound, one of the most fun fighters alive. Not the best, though he was close. The most fun. He hit like a heavyweight who'd been shrunk in the wash, he finished people, and he got into a rivalry with Brandon Moreno that produced one of the greatest flyweight fights ever contested.

Then it faded. Slowly at first, then all at once.

We took every one of his UFC fights, twenty-one of them, from his debut in June 2017 to his loss to Umar Nurmagomedov this past January, and plotted what Good Fights users rated each one. That's the chart at the top of this page: nine years of Deiveson Figueiredo in a single line.

The climb

The early part of the line is busy because the early part of his career was busy. Figueiredo came into the UFC in 2017 as a finisher and basically stayed one: Beltran, Morales, Moraga, all stopped. The one ugly dip in 2019, the unanimous-decision loss to Jussier Formiga, is the lone fight in this whole run rated below "good." Everything else from his first four years sits comfortably in the 7-to-9 range.

Then comes the peak, and it's not subtle. Two demolitions of Joseph Benavidez to claim the vacant flyweight title. A first-round guillotine on Alex Perez. And then, in December 2020, the fight that sits at the very top of this chart: Figueiredo vs. Brandon Moreno I, a five-round majority draw that fans rated 9.36, the single highest-rated fight of his career and one of the best flyweight fights anyone has ever produced. He didn't even win it, and it's still his masterpiece.

The slide

Here's the part that matches what longtime fans feel in their gut. Look at the line after that December 2020 peak. It doesn't fall off a cliff. It just leaks. Moreno II (a loss, but a thriller, still rated 8.9). Moreno III (a grindy decision win, 8.3). Moreno IV (a knockout loss, 7.6). Each chapter of the greatest rivalry of his career was a little less electric than the last.

Then he moved up to bantamweight, and the line settled into a new, lower normal: a band of solid-but-unremarkable 7.3-to-7.6 fights against Font, Garbrandt, and Vera. Respectable. Not appointment television. The lone spike back up, the 8.4 against Petr Yan, was a loss, a competitive five-rounder he came out on the wrong side of. Even his most entertaining recent night wasn't a win.

The cliff

And then the two red dots.

His split-decision win over Montel Jackson in October: rated 3.4. His unanimous-decision loss to Umar Nurmagomedov in January: rated 3.0. These are not just low for Figueiredo; they're among the lowest scores fans hand out to any main-card fight. The man whose ceiling was a 9.36 war has, in his two most recent appearances, produced the two least-watchable fights of his entire UFC tenure.

A couple of caveats, because honesty is the whole point of a chart like this. His earliest fights drew only a handful of ratings each, so those early numbers are noisier than the later ones. And a low entertainment rating isn't a referendum on skill. The Umar fight was a loss to an elite, surging wrestler, and grappling-heavy decisions almost always rate poorly regardless of who's involved. The line measures fun, not ability.

So, can he do it again?

That's the real question, and the chart frames it honestly. Figueiredo is 38. The version of him that defined 2020 fought at 125 pounds with knockout power that made every exchange a coin flip. The version fighting now is a bantamweight, giving up size, increasingly pulled into the kind of measured, grappling-tax fights that his game was never built to win entertainingly.

But here's the thing about a line like this: it's a record of a man who, for one incredible stretch, could turn any fight into a 9. That capacity doesn't fully evaporate. It needs the right opponent, someone willing to stand in front of him, and it needs him to fight like a man with nothing to protect. Give Deiveson Figueiredo a striker and a reason to swing, and the gold line on this chart has shown us exactly how high it can go.

Enter Song Yadong

Which is exactly why his next fight is so interesting. On May 30, 2026, Figueiredo headlines a UFC Fight Night at the Galaxy Arena in Macao against Song Yadong, and on paper, it's the closest thing to the assignment that chart is begging for. Song isn't a wrestler who's going to drag him into another grappling-tax decision. He's a come-forward, heavy-handed striker fighting in front of a home-continent crowd, the kind of opponent who wants to trade in the pocket. That's the one ingredient Figueiredo's most recent fights have been missing: someone who refuses to make it boring.

It's also a genuine crossroads. Figueiredo is 38, riding the two lowest-rated nights of his career, and a third in a row would be hard to spin as anything but the end of the road as a relevant bantamweight. But it's a five-round main event against a striker, exactly the setup where the old Deiveson, the 2020 Deiveson, used to live. If there's a fight left on the calendar that could yank that gold line back up off the floor, it's this one.

The floor is in. We've seen it twice now, in red. On May 30, against a man who'll actually stand in front of him, we find out whether there's any ceiling left.

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