Retired UFC veteran Matt Brown has been blunt in his assessment of former Bellator lightweight champion Michael Chandler, declaring that he’s ‘not a UFC-level guy’ after his latest 1st round TKO loss to Mauricio Ruffy at the UFC Freedom 250 event a week ago.

“With Michael Chandler, just his whole UFC run hasn’t been anything to note… He shouldn’t be the star that he is in the UFC,” Brown told mmafighting.com. “How are you 2-6 and you’re as big of a star as him… I would not be excited to see him fight again. If I’m Dana White, I either cut him or tell him, ‘Look, you need to retire, bro.’ “

However, Brown went on to claim that he could see the 40-year-old Chandler continuing to fight on for other promotions, but just not in the Octagon.

“If he wanted to keep fighting, I think he would probably fit into other organizations. I would like to see him in bare-knuckle, Gamebred MMA stuff. I think there’s fun things for him to do. He is clearly not a UFC-level guy.”

The prime years of Chandler’s long career were spent in the Bellator promotion, where he became one of their biggest ever stars, beating notable names like former UFC champs like Benson Henderson (x2) and Eddie Alvarez, as well as many others along the way.

He finally joined the UFC back in 2021 and started brightly enough with a 1st round TKO victory over Dan Hooker, but wins have been hard to come by since, with a KO win over Tony Ferguson in 2022 being sandwiched in-between a string of defeats to the likes of Charles Oliveira (x2), Justin Geathje, Dustin Poirier and Paddy Pimblett.

with the TKO loss to Ruffy now added to the pile there’s a growing feeling that Chandler should be looking to hang up his gloves, but in a statement last week he indicated that he intends to fight on.

Whether that will be in the UFC or not remains to be seen.