Former two-division UFC champ Alex Pereira fell short in his attempt for a title in a third weight class on Sunday when he was defeated by Ciryl Gane for the promotion’s interim heavyweight title.
While fans and Pereira protest that Gane’s strikes were to the back of the Brazilian’s head, the outcome remains the same – Ciryl Gane defeated Alex Pereira at 1:27 in the second from of the UFC Freedom 250 co-main event.
Now, in his first statement since the defeat, Pereira speaks out against referee Herb Dean.
“Putting myself in the referee’s shoes, my opponent’s there and catches me, I drop, he starts striking,” Pereira said. “The ref is watching that they are illegal shots, but he thinks like this, ‘How am I going to stop this fight?’ It’s illegal, it’s in the rules. You’re not going to be wrong if you stop it. It’s in the rules; you stop it.
“If people say, ‘Why did you stop it?’ Look at the video; nobody was going to say anything about the ref. In that scenario, people give him credit as a man. But now he is not a man. He shouldn’t have been refereeing that fight. To be honest, a guy like that should be punished. That’s how it is. It’s a very serious job. It’s a very serious event. What happened, the ref should’ve faced legal consequences for that.”
Although the loss is bitter, Pereira and his team are not looking to appeal the result of the Ciryl Gane fight.
🚨 Alex Pereira WILL NOT appeal his loss to Ciryl Gane but calls for change
“I’m not here to change the result, I’m here to speak up that something has to be changed. Something has to be done by the commission otherwise nothing will change”
Via @arielhelwani pic.twitter.com/YZIriwYjSQ
— FULL SEND MMA (@full_send_mma) June 17, 2026
“After the jab I dropped, I grabbed his legs,” Pereira said. “It was there, throwing elbows, punches, he’s desperate. He threw a shot he didn’t even believe in, and he wanted to finish the fight in whatever way. He always does that, multiple fights, if you look at his highlights, that’s what you’ll see all the time. I was being very careful about that. Finger in the eye, kick to the groin, that there isn’t supposed to happen, but it does. Even I could potentially do that, but not because I meant to.
“It’s a contact sport, but on the back of the head? You’re right there, man, you have to be seeing it. But that was the opportunity of a lifetime for him, and the referee was right there to see it. The day before the fight, we had a rules meeting. I asked [coach] Plinio [Cruz] to translate for him, and I told him, ‘Look, man, eye poke, groin strikes, those things can happen. It’s not supposed to, but it can happen. But this guy has a long history of it.’ Dirty shots, throwing punches to the back of the head, elbows. I saw some videos, so I was worried. So I brought that up with him ahead of time and asked him to keep an eye on it.
“If you watch the footage, multiple shots there, multiple elbows,” Pereira said. “OK, sure, the jab, but given everything that happened, illegal. I was getting up, it became difficult to recover, but I believe that if it wasn’t for those shots I [wouldn’t] be in that situation and could’ve possibly recovered. Maybe not, but they were very hard shots and illegal.”
