Alexandre Pantoja appeared to suffer a nasty arm injury while falling awkwardly to the mat just 26 seconds into his flyweight title defense against Joshua Van at UFC 324 three weeks ago, but now his coach has revealed that the damage wasn’t as bad as they initially feared.

“The good news is that there was no fracture or ligament injury,” Pantoja’s coach Marcos ‘Parrumpa’ da Matta said on Instagram stories. “From that, we have great expectations for his return. But the exact timeframe is still unknown; he still needs a lot of physiotherapy to start moving his arm, then he can go back to light training and then hard training. Only then will we have an exact idea of how long he will need to return and reclaim our belt.”

Despite this seemingly positive outcome, it’s worth noting that orthopedist Rickson Moraes reported to Sherdog.com that Pantoja may well still face a lengthy recovery period that could potentially keep him out of action for the first half of 2026.

“Generally four to six months, but it depends a lot on the progress in physiotherapy,” Moraes told Sherdog. “So there’s no way to set a date. It depends on future evaluations carried out by the orthopedist who is treating him in the USA.”

If that is the timeline then it doesn’t fit in with the newly crowned champion Van’s expressed interest in making his first title defense at the upcoming UFC Fight Night in Houston, Texas on February 21st, though it should be stressed that the UFC may have other plans for him.

Whatever happens on that front, when Pantoja is fully healed he certainly deserves an immediate title shot given the freak nature of his title loss, and the fact that up until that point he had successfully defended the 125lb belt four times.