Sean O’Malley thinks Petr Yan may be rushing back for Merab Dvalishvili trilogy
O’Malley fought Dvalishvili seven months after his own labrum surgery and calls it his “biggest regret”, but he is still rooting for Yan to win on Saturday.
Sean O’Malley has warned that Petr Yan may have come back too soon from back surgery ahead of his bantamweight title defence against Merab Dvalishvili.
Yan meets Dvalishvili for a third time in the co-main event of UFC 333 in Abu Dhabi on Saturday 24 October, on a main card due to start at 7pm UK time on TNT Sports (UFC 333 UK start times). The trilogy had been expected to happen sooner, but Yan underwent lumbar surgery in January, an operation that lasted nine hours. Dvalishvili won their first fight, a non-title bout at UFC Las Vegas in 2023, before Yan beat him to take the belt at UFC 323.
O’Malley drew on his own experience. Before his 2025 rematch with Dvalishvili, he had labrum surgery to repair his hip, and he said on his YouTube channel: “Assuming he had surgery in January, this is nine months later. … Bro, I got not nearly as bad of a surgery, I got labrum surgery, and I fought Merab seven months after, and that’s my biggest regret of my whole career.”
He said he was not close to where he needed to be for that fight, while Dvalishvili came in confident after a win over Umar, and that operations of that kind need four or five months for the body to properly heal. O’Malley added: “It really changes my thought process on this fight. I thought Petr was going to go in there and dominate, but that alone, him getting surgery that close, sounds [bad].” The exact purpose of Yan’s surgery has not been detailed, so the expected recovery time for it is unclear.
O’Malley said that if Yan is not compromised by the operation, he is a real problem for Dvalishvili, and he is hoping for a Yan win either way. “Pete is no joke. He is no god damn joke,” he said, calling Yan one of the scariest fighters in the UFC.
He has a personal stake in the result. O’Malley last fought Yan over three rounds in Abu Dhabi on 22 October 2022, and said that if Yan keeps the belt, the two of them are next, calling a rematch the biggest fight in bantamweight history. He also said he likes Dvalishvili as a person.
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