Bellator

Bellator built its identity on the tournament. Where most promotions decide who deserves a title fight by judgement, its founding idea was that the fighter who beat three opponents in a row had settled the question himself.

The grand prix format

A tournament bracket answers the same complaint the season format answers, by a different route. Instead of a league table, an eight-fighter bracket: win and advance, lose and you are out. The appeal is that nothing has to be argued afterwards — the fighter left standing beat everyone put in front of him.

It also creates a distinctive kind of pressure. A fighter in a bracket cannot plan for one opponent at a time without risk, because the damage taken in a quarter-final is carried into a semi-final weeks or months later. Reading a tournament run below is therefore not the same as reading three unrelated fights: the third one was contested by a fighter who had already been through two.

A parallel roster

For most of its history the promotion ran a full set of weight classes alongside the largest organisation in the sport, which had a consequence worth knowing when reading records. A fighter could hold a divisional title here while being unranked in the wider sport, and the reverse — the two rosters overlapped much less than their weight classes suggest.

That makes the opposition column below more informative than the win column. A run here was built against a specific pool of fighters, and the step across to another promotion has historically been a real one in both directions.

Bouts follow the Unified Rules of MMA, contested over three five-minute rounds with five for championship fights and tournament finals.

The pages below list every fighter in this catalogue whose most recent bout was in Bellator, with their weight class, their record and how each of their last five fights ended.