Fighters aged 38 or older have won 48 of the 125 decisive UFC five-round fights they have taken. That is 38.4%.
Alexander Volkanovski joins that sample on October 24. He turns 38 on September 29, and 25 days later he defends the featherweight title against Movsar Evloev at UFC 333 in Abu Dhabi — 38.07 years old on fight night, 5.37 years older than the man across the cage.
Only 26 fighters have ever won a UFC five-round fight at 38 or older. None of them did it at featherweight. Fighters that age are 0 for 6 in five-round fights at 145 pounds.
That is the curve. This article is about the fighter standing on it. We pulled every round of Volkanovski's 18 UFC fights — 15 wins, 3 losses, 11 of them scheduled for five rounds — to find out what age has actually taken from him, and what it hasn't.
Can Volkanovski win a UFC title fight at 38?
It is rare: fighters aged 38 or older have won 48 of 125 decisive UFC five-round fights (38.4%), and only 26 have ever done it. Volkanovski's minute-weighted strike rate is down 20% since he turned 35, but judges still gave him 24 of the 30 rounds they scored across his two title fights with Diego Lopes.
I. The Lopes Rematch at 37
Every Volkanovski Decision, Round by Round
Each bar is one UFC decision: the rounds the three judges scored for Volkanovski (amber) and against him (red). A three-round fight has 9 judge-rounds, a five-round fight 15.
Career: 111 of 141 judge-rounds across 11 decisions. The two Lopes fights: 24 of 30.
Round-by-round scorecards from MMADecisions.com, oriented to Volkanovski's side (he is the second-listed fighter on the Makhachev card). Faded bars are three-round fights. Scorecard coverage through 2026-04-25.
UFC 325 in Sydney on January 31 was the closest thing to a controlled experiment that Volkanovski's age has produced. Same opponent as 294 days earlier. Same five rounds. Same result. A different engine.
At UFC 314 in April 2025, aged 36, he beat Diego Lopes for the belt Ilia Topuria had vacated. He landed 158 significant strikes, 6.32 a minute, and the judges gave him 11 of the 15 rounds on their cards.
In the rematch, aged 37, he landed 98 — 3.92 a minute, the lowest strike rate of any of his 15 UFC wins. The judges gave him more, not less: 13 of 15, on cards of 49-46, 49-46 and 50-45.
He won by more while doing less. Lopes landed 70 significant strikes, 2.80 a minute. Volkanovski out-landed him in each of the last four rounds after a 12-12 first, finished 2 of 7 takedowns, and held 2:49 of control to Lopes's 1:50. It was not the Volkanovski of the Holloway trilogy. It was a champion managing a fight.
That is the pattern across his whole career on the cards. In 11 UFC decisions, judges have scored 141 rounds and given him 111. The only decision he has lost was the first Makhachev fight, at lightweight, where he took 5 of 15.
II. The 38-and-Over Club
Five-Round Fights: Who Wins as Fighters Age
Win rate in every decisive UFC fight scheduled for five rounds, split by the fighter's age on fight night — or by how much older he or she was than the opponent.
38 and older: 48–77 (38.4%), and only 26 different fighters have ever won one. Volkanovski is 38.07 on October 24.
Five-round = UFCStats scheduled rounds (title fights and main events). Draws and no-contests excluded. Data through 2026-09-19.
Start with every UFC fight scheduled for five rounds that produced a winner: 885 bouts, and 1,765 fighter appearances with a known date of birth. Then sort every fighter by age on fight night.
| Age on fight night | Record | Win rate |
|---|---|---|
| Under 28 | 190–150 | 55.9% |
| 28–30 | 223–223 | 50.0% |
| 31–33 | 248–228 | 52.1% |
| 34–35 | 101–130 | 43.7% |
| 36–37 | 74–73 | 50.3% |
| 38 and older | 48–77 | 38.4% |
The curve is not a smooth slide. It dips at 34–35 and recovers at 36–37 — most likely a survivor effect, because the fighters still headlining at 36 are the ones who kept winning at 34. Then it breaks. At 38 and older the win rate falls to 38.4%, and against opponents at least five years younger it is 32–58, or 35.6%.
The 38-and-Over Club
Every fighter who has won a UFC five-round fight at 38 or older — 26 of them. Rank by how often they did it, or by how old they were when they last did.
15 more fighters have exactly one. The most recent member is Alex Pereira, who was 38.2 when he beat Magomed Ankalaev in October 2025.
Age = event date minus UFCStats date of birth. Five-round = UFCStats scheduled rounds. Data through 2026-09-19.
Only 26 fighters have won a five-round UFC fight at 38 or older. Randy Couture has six of them, the last at 44.2. Daniel Cormier has four, all of them in 2017 and 2018. Henderson, Hunt, Teixeira, Cannonier and Overeem have three apiece, and Dan Henderson is the oldest winner on the list: 44.8 when he knocked out Boetsch in 2015. The most recent is Alex Pereira, who was 38.2 when he stopped Ankalaev in October 2025.
Look at where those wins happened and the club gets smaller again. Forty-two of the 48 came at middleweight or heavier, 19 of them at heavyweight alone. At 145 pounds or lighter, fighters aged 38 and older are 2–11 in five-round fights, and both wins came at bantamweight — Edgar in 2020, and Holm at women's bantamweight the same year.
At featherweight they are 0 for 6. A Volkanovski win on October 24 would be the first.
III. Eighteen Fights, One Curve
Volkanovski's Output, Fight by Fight
Significant strikes landed and absorbed per minute in each of his 18 UFC fights, plotted against his age on the night. Red rings are the three losses.
Before 35
14 fights · 241 min
6.25 landed/min
3.36 absorbed/min
Since 35
4 fights · 62 min
4.98 landed/min
3.12 absorbed/min
Weighted by minutes fought, his strike rate is down 20.3% since 35 (17.2% without the 3-minute second Makhachev fight). The peak was 8.76 a minute against Chan Sung Jung at 33.5.
Rates are total strikes over total cage minutes, not an average of per-fight rates, so a 3-minute fight counts for 3 minutes. Data through 2026-09-19.
Volkanovski's peak came at 33.5: 8.76 significant strikes a minute against the Korean Zombie at UFC 273, the best rate of his UFC career.
Split his career at his 35th birthday, and weight every fight by the minutes it actually lasted:
| Fights | Minutes | Landed / min | Absorbed / min | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before 35 | 14 | 241 | 6.25 | 3.36 |
| Since 35 | 4 | 62 | 4.98 | 3.12 |
The output is down 20%. Take out the 3:06 he lasted in the second Makhachev fight and it is down 17%. That drop is real, and it shows up in his wins too: 3.92 a minute against Lopes in January.
What is not down is the rate he gets hit. Since 35 he absorbs 3.12 significant strikes a minute, fewer than the 3.36 before. The naive version of this chart — an average of each fight's rate — says the opposite, climbing from 3.02 to 4.29, because it counts 3:06 against Makhachev (7.74 absorbed a minute) as heavily as 25 minutes against Lopes. Weighted by the minutes actually fought, the jump disappears.
The knockdowns do not. In 14 fights before 35, Volkanovski was knocked down once. In four fights since, he has been knocked down three times — by Islam Makhachev, by Ilia Topuria, and by Lopes in their first fight. The first two ended in knockouts, and the Topuria one is part of the featherweight knockout rate we broke down in The Knockout Artist and El Matador.
Two caveats keep this from being a verdict. First, it is four fights, and two of them were against the only two men who have knocked him out; four data points cannot separate age from opposition. Second, it runs against the rest of the sport. In Built Different we found that fighters at 38 throw roughly the same volume as fighters at 28 — the average fighter does not slow down with age. Volkanovski's drop is his own curve, not a law of the division.
IV. The Fifth Round Is Still His
Round by Round in Five-Round Fights
Significant strikes per round, Volkanovski against his opponents. Fewer fights reach each later round, so the second view keeps only the fights that went the full distance.
Round one to round five: 21.1 → 36.0 landed a round; his opponents went 15.2 → 18.1.
Five-round = UFCStats scheduled rounds. A round that ended in a finish counts as it happened. Data through 2026-09-19.
Volkanovski has fought 11 UFC fights scheduled for five rounds and gone 8–3 in them. Across them he averages 21.1 significant strikes landed in the first round and 36.0 in the fifth.
That comparison flatters him, because fewer fights reach each later round: 11 reached the first, 10 the second, 9 the third, 8 the fourth and 7 the fifth. So hold the fights constant. In the seven that went the full 25 minutes, he went from 22.0 landed in the first round to 36.0 in the fifth — 64% more — while his opponents went from 15.4 to 18.1.
It is the championship-rounds pattern we measured across the whole UFC in The Fatigue Factor, at the scale of one fighter, and the judges have noticed. In his seven five-round decisions they gave him the fifth round on 17 of 21 cards. In the two Lopes fights, at 36 and 37, they gave him the fifth on all six — and 24 of the 30 rounds overall.
V. What Evloev Brings
Movsar Evloev's Wrestling vs. the Division
Evloev's 10 UFC fights compared with every featherweight appearance since 2019 (946 fighter-fights). Per-fight averages.
Takedowns landed per fight
4.6× the field
Takedown accuracy
1.4× the field
Control minutes per fight
2.8× the field
10–0 in the UFC, 10 decisions: 51 takedowns on 97 attempts across 160 minutes in the cage.
Field = both fighters in every UFC bout listed at featherweight, 2019-01-01 to 2026-09-19. Control time from UFCStats round data.
Movsar Evloev is 10–0 in the UFC, and every one of those wins went to the judges: 10 decisions, 160 minutes. He is 32.70 on October 24.
His numbers are wrestling numbers. Evloev has landed 51 of 97 takedown attempts — 5.1 a fight at 52.6% — and averages 5.71 minutes of control per fight. The featherweight field since 2019 lands 1.10 takedowns a fight at 37.6% and holds 2.01 minutes of control. On the feet he lands 3.91 significant strikes a minute and absorbs 2.80.
Volkanovski has stopped 68.9% of the takedowns tried against him in the UFC: 14 of 45 got through. The one fight where the wrestling took over was his first with Islam Makhachev, at lightweight — 4 of 9 takedowns landed against him, 7:37 of control, and the only decision on his record that went the other way. Control time is how that kind of fight gets scored; The Invisible Round is our full breakdown of how judges weigh it, and Division Meta has where featherweight sits among the divisions on the mat.
VI. What 38 Actually Means
On October 24 Volkanovski is 5.37 years older than Evloev. In UFC five-round fights where one fighter was five to eight years older than the other, the older fighter won 83 of 202 — 41.1%. With a gap under two years it is 49.6%. Past eight years, 39.4%.
The 38-and-older figures are real, and they describe 47 different fighters who took a five-round fight at 38 or older — 67 of their 125 appearances at heavyweight or light heavyweight. They cannot say which 38-year-old walks into the Etihad Arena. A base rate is the average of everyone who got there. Volkanovski's own record since 35 — fewer strikes landed, no more absorbed, more knockdowns, and fifth rounds the judges still give him — is the part that belongs to him alone.
The age curve in Built Different and the late-round surge in The Fatigue Factor are both averages across thousands of fighters. Volkanovski has sat on the wrong side of the first since his 33rd birthday and gone 5–3. He has sat on the right side of the second every time a five-round fight lasted: in all seven that went the distance, he landed more in the fifth round than in the first.
On October 24 he will be 38 years and 25 days old. Fighters that age have won 38.4% of UFC five-round fights, and none at featherweight. He has also taken 24 of the last 30 rounds judges have scored for him.
Both of those things are true. Only one of them is about him.
Based on 885 decisive UFC five-round fights (1,765 fighter appearances with a known date of birth) and all 18 of Alexander Volkanovski's UFC fights, through September 19, 2026.
Methodology: Data sourced from UFCStats.com through the September 19, 2026 card. A "five-round fight" is any bout whose scheduled_rounds is 5. That field is a heuristic — a title bout, or a main event after November 5, 2011 — so it also sweeps in 31 Ultimate Fighter tournament finals and 42 pre-2001 bouts of mixed format: the finals were three-round bouts below the main event, and 32 of the pre-2001 bouts came before UFC 21 in July 1999, when the UFC adopted five-minute rounds, though a few after it were genuine five-round title fights. Dropping both groups anyway moves the 38-and-older record to 47–76 (38.2%) with 25 different winners. The separate title-bout flag is never used. Only decisive results count: draws and no-contests are excluded. Age is (event date − date of birth) in days ÷ 365.25, from UFCStats birth dates; 5 of 1,770 appearances have no usable birth date and drop out. Per-minute rates divide total significant strikes by total cage minutes, where a fight lasts (finish round − 1) × 5 minutes plus the finish time — they are minute-weighted, not an average of per-fight rates. The unweighted average would put Volkanovski's strike-rate drop since 35 at 32%, about half of it from the 3:06 second Makhachev fight. Round-by-round figures use every round he fought in bouts scheduled for five rounds; a round that ended in a finish counts as fought. Judge-rounds come from the round-by-round scorecards on MMADecisions.com (coverage through April 25, 2026), counted from Volkanovski's side of each card. The featherweight field is both fighters in every UFC bout listed at featherweight from January 1, 2019. Movsar Evloev's figures cover all 10 of his UFC fights, including his March 2026 majority decision over Lerone Murphy. This article describes fights that have already happened; it makes no call on UFC 333.