Jailton Almeida has unexpectedly been cut from the UFC roster after suffering back-to-back defeats in the Octagon at heavyweight.

Such a decision would have seemed unthinkable just a year ago when the 34-year-old was coming off back-to-back 1st round finishes over Alexander Romanov and Sergei Spivac, taking his UFC record to an impressive 8-1, including 7 stoppage victories.

However, Almeida’s reputation suffered lasting damage during a painfully lackluster fight against Alexander Volkov at UFC 321 last September, which saw him successfully manage to get the fight where he wanted it on the mat, only to then repeatedly fail to mount any significant offense. That came back to haunt him when the judges marked their clear disapproval of his stalling tactics by awarding Volkov a split-decision victory.

Almeida had a chance to make amends last weekend when he went up against Rizvan Kuniev at UFC Fight Night 266, but again Almeida looked out-of-sorts and played his part in another hard-to-watch fight where he was unable to secure takedowns and was often cancelled out in the clinch, leading to a unanimous decision defeat.

Afterwards, Almeida announced his decision to move back down to 205lbs for the first time since his UFC debut back in 2022, but that apparently wasn’t enough to convince the promotion to keep him on-board and so he’ll now have to move on to pastures new.