Makwan Amirkhani Says His Good Side Will Show Up At OKTAGON 54

A year removed from his UFC run, ‘Mr. Finland’ believes he has perfectly lined himself up for a career resurgence.

On paper, there are a lot of reasons to count out Makwan Amirkhani.

The end of “Mr. Finland’s” UFC run was brutal. He consumed five losses in his last six appearances, a streak that was a far cry from his head-turning opening few years inside the promotion.

He’s 35 years old, putting him slightly past the typical prime years of an MMA fighter. He’s also entering OKTAGON’s 16-man lightweight tournament, a bracket that has tough names like his first-round opponent, Mochamed Machaev.

You could list every reason why Amirkhani will lose on Saturday, but it wouldn’t matter to him. Not because he disagrees – although he does, and has a reason to refute every factor mentioned above – but because he’s tuning everything out.

Amirkhani has been incredibly focused heading into his OKTAGON 54 appearance this weekend, avoiding anything that could disrupt his current mindset. He goes to the grocery store during off-peak hours so it’s less likely that he will run into someone who knows him. He doesn’t look at Instagram. Instead, he simply opens the app, posts, then closes the app. He also doesn’t focus on any of the talk around his fight.

“If it would be up to me, I wouldn’t do this interview,” he candidly told Knockdown News.

When talking with Amirkhani, it became clear why he is so careful about managing his headspace during training camp: Amirkhani feels like he is fighting himself more than anyone else.

There’s a certain quote Amirkhani heard a couple years ago that stuck with him. As much as the quote demonstrated that Amirkhani can get in his own head, his strong memory of someone else’s comment also showed that people’s comments have stuck with him in the past. Ahead of a fight in 2022, opponent Mike Grundy told The AllStar that some Amirkhani performances are characteristically different from others: “Sometimes Makwan shows some great skills, it just depends what Makwan shows up that night.”

The quote illustrated something that the Finnish fighter completely agrees with: there were two Amirkhanis that fought during his UFC stint, and you never knew which you would get.

“There are fights that I’m not myself, you can see it from the very beginning of the fight,” he said. “From the entrance to the fight week, you can see that not everything is okay. I get what he meant by that.”

A series of unfortunate outings was what sent him out of the UFC last year. While he won his fight against Grundy, stoppage losses against Jonathan Pearce and Jack Shore subsequently caused him to depart the promotion in 2023. By the time he was done with the promotion, he had won just half of his 14 appearances in the Octagon.

Changes were due to be made for Amirkhani if he hoped to improve. Heading into his upcoming fight, he thinks that differences in his lifestyle and training have put him in perfect form for this weekend.

Amirkhani admittedly used to be the type of person who would seek out comments from the public. Whether it was a fellow fighter assessing his skills or a commenter who said Amirkhani was more likely to win when he had a beard (which Amirkhani, currently donning a thick beard, said was true), he was listening to what people said. But one of the major changes in his life recently has been deciding to just ignore it all.

“I used to be that guy who was reading all the comments. I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to show you motherf******s,'” he remembers thinking. “But now I’m like, I don’t care about any of that. That has nothing to do with the fight itself. You just put extra thoughts in your head.”

A change in the Amirkhani household also put his fighting career into his perspective: In 2022, he welcomed his first child.

Amirhani calls his son “a present from a God” and “his best friend.” It’s been extra motivation for him to go harder in MMA.

“[When you have a child], then you understand you are not responsible for just yourself anymore. There is somebody to feed. This is serious … Your instincts come out.”

Amirkhani has cultivated a strong community at his gym, MA Training Center. He says the gym, which opened four years ago in Raisio, Finland, had just a few fighters showing up at the start. Now, it’s up to about 40. Amirkhani has tried to keep the space strictly for serious competitors: “No idea of just coming to lose weight,” he says.

Saturday is the first of many potential fights for Amirkhani this year, if successful. He’s in OKTAGON’s Tipsport Gamechanger Lightweight Grand Prix, a 16-man tournament that has a grand prize of 1,000,000 Euro.

But the finals of the tournament are a long way from now. And speaking of the now, many believe Amirkhani’s journey ends there. On the MMA database Tapology, just 28 percent of users believe he will overcome his first opponent, Austrian contender Machaev.

Machaev’s pro record is much closer to spotless than Amirkhani’s. Apart from a 2021 blemish to Gamzat Magomedov, his record has been nothing but wins since debuting in 2017. He’s coming over to OKTAGON this year after previously earning victories in notable promotions like Brave CF and UAE Warriors.

If his quest towards the end of the tournament doesn’t conclude Saturday, Amirkhani thinks he’ll have people convinced that he could go all the way. He mentioned that this weekend could give him a chance to showcase his fight IQ to fans.

“I’ve been doing this for over 15 years, and I think some people may say that ‘His prime time is done,'” Amirkhani said, acknowledging his one-and-a-half decades of fighting mileage. “But me? I’m very excited for this next fight because even my opponent afterward will be like ‘Damn, he will win this tournament.”‘

There’s no doubt that Amirkhani appears to be fully dedicated to his upcoming fight. After more than a year outside of the cage, he’s coming back with a load of training and a new outlook.

But the question that cannot be answered until Saturday is which Amirkhani will appear at OKTAGON 54. Will it be the Amirkhani that can stun the crowd with a quick finish, like he did numerous times in his eight-year UFC run? Or will it be the other Amirkhani, the one that doubters confidently think will show up?

This weekend could be the start of a redemption story for Amirkhani, getting back wins that a less mature version of him wouldn’t have attained. The veteran fighter seems sure that Saturday will be the beginning of something big. But outside of his bubble, there’s a lot of doubters who are expecting to see the absolute opposite when he’s across from Machaev in Ostravar, Czech Republic.