Johnny Eblen found himself on the receiving end of arguably the biggest MMA upset of 2025 earlier this month at PFL Africa.
The now-former PFL middleweight champion was well on his way to his 17th career victory with what would’ve been a relatively comfortable decision win against Costello van Steenis at the July 19 event. Or at least he was until the final minute, when van Steenis abruptly pulled off a Hail Mary submission and choked Eblen unconscious with only seven seconds left on the clock.
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Eblen and van Steenis have already traded verbal jabs with one another in the weeks since their dramatic fight, with the new champ expressing a willingness to move on and face PFL’s next middleweight tournament winner, either Dalton Rosta or Fabian Edwards. That idea doesn’t sit well with the previously unbeaten Eblen, who responded to van Steenis on Wednesday’s edition of “The Ariel Helwani Show.”
“If you’re a real man, bro, you’ll run it back with me,” Eblen said. “You watched that fight, and you watched those first three rounds — I dominated you.
“It’s just frustrating, because as a man, I wouldn’t want to win that way. I would want to win by completely dominating you, not having a fluke victory like he did.
“It doesn’t seem like he wants the rematch,” Eblen continued, “and I watched the fight back, and I can see why. Dude, if I just navigate that fight a little smarter, and I fight with a higher fight IQ and I take my time, I don’t think he wins a round and he’s going to lose that fight. So of course he wants to fight a guy he’s already beaten, Fabian, or fight a guy he thinks he can beat in Dalton. He doesn’t want to deal with the same problems [that I present]. He knows that it was kind of a fluke win, in a sense. I want that one back, and he wants to go off into the sunset with that belt and never have to fight me again.”
Eblen’s loss to van Steenis represented his first in-cage appearance in nine months after previously defending the title in October against the aforementioned Edwards. Considering his dominance over the division since emerging in Bellator six years ago, Eblen was heavily favored to beat van Steenis.
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That didn’t happen, though, so Eblen believes its only logical for the promotion to change course.
“I feel like that’s the biggest [PFL middleweight] fight you can make right now, is me and Costello, the rematch,” he said. “There’s a story behind it. There’s a huge fan base behind it. People want to see that fight again. That’s how you build MMA. I feel like that would be the smartest decision to make in this scenario, but I feel like they already had plans to do the tournament winner vs. the PFL Champion Series winner.
“You have to be able to pivot when things like this happen and you can make big fights where people want to watch them. … Being able to pivot and make the biggest fights as soon as possible, I think, is very, very awesome to do. If you can, great. If you can’t, that’s no good. But I think an immediate rematch in Spain, me and Costello, that fight sells. People are going to watch it and it’s going to be a f***ing banger, and I hope they do it. But I’m at the mercy of them.”
Above all else, Eblen simply wants to be more active than he’s been since Bellator was absorbed by PFL in late 2023. He managed to secure two fights in 2024, with one coming at the start of the year and another coming at the end. At that current rate, Eblen’s chances of getting a second fight in 2025 aren’t looking good, but Eblen said he’ll take a non-title bout if he has to, despite his hopes of getting revenge.
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“It’s frustrating, man. I’m 33,” Eblen said. “I just want to fight the best guys in the world, and I want to fight often, and I don’t have all the time in the world. We all have a clock that runs out. Hopefully, mine lasts a bit longer, but it’s frustrating when you can’t fight super often and you see other fighters fight maybe three, four or even five times a year.
“If it’s not Costello [next], I’ll fight somebody to stay active. I’m in this game to fight, and that’s what I’m going to do.”
During his championship reign, Eblen was one of the more vocal fighters to voice his frustrations with issues such as inactivity or how his fellow crop of Bellator champions were being treated. His qualms never quite reached the volume of fighters like Patricio Pitbull or Patchy Mix, who are now in the UFC, but Eblen wasn’t exactly quiet either.
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That led to speculation that he may have fallen out of favor with the PFL. Eblen’s teammate at American Top Team, fellow PFL standout Dakota Ditcheva, hinted at rumblings that Eblen’s loss to van Steenis was celebrated internally by PFL employees on the night.
From Eblen’s perspective, though, he hasn’t felt slighted in any way, even if PFL doesn’t go in the direction of a van Steenis rematch.
“I think for the betterment of the company, you’ve got to make the biggest fights,” Eblen said. “Paul Hughes vs. Usman [Nurmagomedov 2] — I want to see that, dude. I want to watch that. That’s a great fight. To really set yourself apart, you’ve got to take the best fighters you have and match them up and get them to fight. When people want to see people fight, you’ve got to make those fights happen.
“I feel like PFL likes me. I have a good relationship with PFL, they take care of me. I’m happy being there. I’m getting paid well, they’re treating me well. Fight week was great. I have a great relationship with Mike Kogan, me and him go way back to the Bellator days. I don’t necessarily get a personal sense that people are rooting against me within PFL, but maybe they are on a personal level, and maybe [they’re] not overt about it. Maybe if they were overt about it when I lost in that immediate reaction to it, but when it comes behind closed doors and how I deal with them, it doesn’t feel like that.”