Bisping, Edwards and Aspinall: Inside the making of English MMA's golden generation

LONG BEFORE THE country of England could claim multiple UFC champions, there was once a time when only one English mixed martial arts fighter looked the part.

In 2002, heavyweight Ian Freeman, at age 33, was the best fighter in England.

“The story on Ian Freeman was he was the only guy that [England] had that looked like he could go somewhere,” Dan Hardy, former UFC welterweight and current PFL executive, told ESPN.

With the UFC staging its first event in the United Kingdom at the Royal Albert Hall for UFC 38 in July 2002, Freeman ended up with the improbable role of challenging an undefeated Frank Mir while fighting with a heavy heart.

“I was going through my locker room talk with Ian as I do with all fighters, and I remember he told me that Frank Mir would have to kill him to stop him that night, because he was dedicating the fight to his father,” retired referee John McCarthy told ESPN.

Before the event, Freeman’s father, Billy, a former boxer, was diagnosed with brain cancer and given only weeks to live. His mother encouraged him not to withdraw from his fight, and Ian eventually agreed to remain in the co-main event. He finished Mir with ground strikes in the final seconds of the opening round, handing England a massive victory over a future heavyweight champion.

Following the win, Freeman shared the details of father’s health status with the fans in attendance, and called out to him at the end of the post-fight interview.

“So for you daddy, I love you.” Freeman said to his father, who he thought was watching from their home in County Durham.

Unbeknownst to him, his father had died the day before. Freeman later said he was happy his family kept that from him, as he likely would have withdrawn from the fight or been distracted during the match.

That detail is worth noting, as that individual performance by Freeman did much to spark the next generation of English talent — and it nearly didn’t happen.

“That event, in a lot of ways, was a game changer to me,” Hardy said. “I still get goosebumps talking about it, Ian Freeman sitting on the Octagon wall after knocking out Frank Mir. For England, Ian Freeman was the main event of that card.”

No one can say exactly when the story of English MMA began, of course. Martial arts always existed in some form. But many would say the story of English MMA as we know it started right then and there, with McCarthy waving off the fight and handing Freeman, and his country, a banner moment in the sport.

“At that very moment, I was just like, ‘Holy s—. I need to do whatever that guy just did.’ That was the moment for me, and I’m sure for a lot of other people,” Hardy said.

Two decades after England’s first UFC event, the country finds itself flush with two champions in welterweight king Leon Edwards and interim heavyweight titleholder Tom Aspinall — both of whom will fight this Saturday at UFC 304 in Manchester (10 p.m. ET on ESPN+ PPV). Plus, England’s future is bright with the next wave of prospects poised to become stars, such as Paddy Pimblett and Dakota Ditcheva, among others. Through it all, their inspirations and opportunities can be drawn back to an Englishman pulling off an upset while dealing with his father’s failing health.

Now, the region is arguably one of the world’s strongest developers of MMA talent.

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MICHAEL BISPING, THE most influential fighter in English MMA, did not watch UFC 38. But he still suspects it had a major impact on his life.

In 2002, while Freeman proved that an Englishman could win in the UFC, Bisping was working at an upholstery factory in Sabden, England, on weekdays and as a DJ — “Mikey B” — on the weekends. He’d competed in martial arts tournaments between the ages of 8 and 18, but by the summer of 2002, he was 23 and far removed from combat sports. He’d tried to join the British Army, where he could get paid to train boxing, but was turned away due to a legal history stemming from street fights.

“I was completely oblivious to it,” Bisping told ESPN of UFC 38. “I was living a working-class life. But it all coincides with [UFC 38] because shortly after, I got in touch with the guy who used to train me, he was a lecturer at a university. And maybe it was because UFC 38 had just happened, he said, ‘I’ll sponsor you. Fight in the UFC. If you become a champion, there’s money. You’ll become a celebrity and do movies, all this s—.’ That’s what he sold me.”

Bisping bought in. He quit his job at the factory and rededicated his life to training. Rekindling his boxing and kickboxing skills came easily, as England had a rich culture of both. Grappling was more difficult.

“We had a coach, but I remember sitting around in this church hall, trying to figure out ways to escape a triangle choke,” Bisping said. “Now, all you’ve got to do is YouTube it, and there will be a video showing you 20 different ways. We were just experimenting and figuring it out, kind of teaching ourselves, because the coach had a martial arts background but it was a traditional background, and he had all of these books we would look at.”

Bisping made his MMA debut in April 2004, for Pride and Glory, a local promotion run by none other than Freeman. By the end of 2005, Bisping had run his pro record to 10-0 and won titles in both major promotions in the U.K., Cage Warriors and Cage Rage. After making its English debut in 2002, the UFC didn’t return until 2007, which left a fertile opportunity for a local promotion to fill that MMA void.

“A lot of UFC champions have now come through Cage Warriors,” Hardy said. “They turned into the mainstay promotion, and they had a forum, Cage Warriors Forum, I literally used to check that forum as much as I check my emails these days. It was really a central point for European MMA during that time.”

However, the UFC was still the mecca of MMA, and in 2006, Bisping earned an invite to the third season of “The Ultimate Fighter.” He won the tournament by knocking out Josh Haynes in the final. When he returned home, the company put Bisping to work promoting and educating U.K. fans and media about the sport, much like his counterparts Chuck Liddell and Randy Couture had done in the U.S.

“I’d be on the train to London every week, if not twice a week, just to do thousands and thousands of interviews,” said Bisping. “Just speaking to journalists, trying to charm them, trying to tell them how great MMA is, answering questions like, ‘Can you bring weapons in with you?’ But over time, it started to feel like it was getting somewhere. You’d see it in the newspaper, and Bravo started playing the UFC.”

With Bisping as its centerpiece fighter, the UFC started promoting in England again. Four of his first nine appearances in the UFC came on English soil, and he took advantage by cementing himself as one of the best middleweights in the world. In 2008, Zoo Magazine named him the “Coolest British Man of the Year,” ahead of celebrities such as David Beckham and Daniel Craig.

“Michael Bisping put a British face and a British accent on this crazy American sport,” said Anthony Evans, the UFC’s former director of media relations during the time of Bisping’s ascent in the sport. “Bisping was head and shoulders better than any fighter in the U.K. at the time.”

That exposure created more English talent in MMA. Seven years after Freeman’s victory at UFC 38, UFC 105 was held in Manchester in 2009. Ten of the 22 fighters on the card were fighting out of England.

“He drew attention to a sport that the young footballer guys weren’t really watching,” said Hardy. “There were some old boxing fans watching, but Bisping was the first guy that was like, ‘If anyone is going to truly do something in the UFC, he’s the guy,’ and the general hooligan pub guy, the guys working, digging up roads, building houses — those were Bisping guys.”

It took Bisping a decade to get his first UFC title shot, and it came on short notice against Luke Rockhold in June 2016. At age 37, Bisping knocked out Rockhold in the first round at UFC 199 to claim England’s first UFC championship. By then, Bisping had moved his family to Southern California and wasn’t sure what the accomplishment meant to his home country. He got his answer the first time he returned with the belt.

“I went to this traffic center, it’s one of the biggest shopping malls in Europe, and they scheduled an appearance, like, ‘The champ is coming with the belt,'” Bisping said. “And I thought, ‘This is gonna be so cringe, there’s going to be hardly anyone there.’ Thousands and thousands and thousands of people [showed up]. It was absolutely insane. I couldn’t even get through to everyone. I’ll never forget that.

“It shows, where can an English fighter get to in terms of notoriety or fame? It’s very, very achievable and viable, because for me, it was f—ing insane.”

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PADDY PIMBLETT LIKED two things as a kid: fighting and football. He wasn’t skilled enough to advance in football, so he needed something else to aspire to that was within reason. In the early hours of Sept. 19, 2008, Pimblett found his muse in UFC 103. When a Vitor Belfort left hook sank Rich Franklin to the canvas, the 13-year-old Pimblett from Liverpool decided that fighting was what he wanted to do.

And at 5 a.m. that same morning, Pimblett figured there was no time like the present to start getting in shape.

“I saw that, put a tracksuit on and went for a three-mile jog that morning,” Pimblett told ESPN. He joined a local gym, Next Generation MMA, and never looked back.

“When I first started training MMA, people would say, ‘What are you doing? Cagefighting? Punching people in the balls and eye gouging?'” Pimblett said. He had upset his parents with his decision to make a career out of fighting, and his secondary school teacher quipped that he was too small to be a fighter.

Pimblett made his professional debut in 2012 at age 17 and amassed a 3-0 record before signing with Cage Warriors in 2013. While preparing for his debut in the promotion, he met a young woman who would become one of his best friends.

Molly McCann wanted to be a boxer after an ankle injury ended her pro football career with Liverpool. A blood relative to future Irish boxing great Katie Taylor, McCann didn’t lack skill as she went on to capture an amateur national title. However, she lacked something she couldn’t control: size.

She was too small for the weight classes offered in international and Olympic boxing, thus dashing her dreams of becoming a world champion boxer. McCann spent her evenings working in a Liverpool nightclub where MMA fighters Chris Fishgold and Danny Roberts worked security.

Aware of her boxing background, Roberts and Fishgold asked if McCann would help a friend of theirs — British women’s MMA pioneer Rosi Sexton — prepare for a fight. McCann agreed.

“I didn’t like it at first because I’m a boxer and I didn’t want anyone sweating on me because I wasn’t into grappling,” McCann told ESPN.

A year later, in the wee hours of the morning, McCann happened to come across UFC 157 on television and witnessed Ronda Rousey‘s promotional debut. McCann had never seen women fight on this grand of a stage, and immediately after Rousey submitted Liz Carmouche to claim the UFC’s first women’s bantamweight title, she grabbed her phone to ask Roberts and Fishgold if she could come back to the gym to train because she now knew what she wanted to do with her life.

The gym was Next Generation MMA, and she met a skinny young man named Paddy Pimblett.

The two struck a friendship that blossomed as they climbed their respective ladders to become local heroes in the MMA scene. McCann found success first and got the call from the UFC in 2018 after winning the Cage Warriors flyweight championship. Pimblett was not far behind, as he made his UFC debut in 2021.

“We are two kids that come from working-class backgrounds, who don’t conform to what we don’t believe in,” McCann said of their popularity. The two landed an eight-part docuseries on BBC that began airing earlier this month, chronicling their lives in and out of the Octagon.

“We are living our dream in front of everyone.”

That dream would be crystallized on March 19, 2022, the first time in three years following the COVID-19 pandemic that the UFC brought a Fight Night card to London.

The card featured 10 British fighters — seven from England — in front of a sellout O2 Arena crowd, including McCann, Aspinall and Pimblett. For Aspinall and Pimblett, this would be their first UFC fight in front of a packed arena.

Nine of the 12 fights that night in London ended with a knockout or submission, with British fighters going 7-3. McCann delivered a knockout of the year performance, when a spinning back elbow to Luana Carolina swiftly ended the fight. Pimblett followed shortly after, forcing Kazula Vargas to tap midway through the second round via a rear-naked choke, causing the arena to erupt in celebration. McCann, sitting just outside the Octagon, joined her friend inside for a victory celebration to The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah.” The event was capped off by Aspinall finishing Volkov with a straight armbar, giving fight fans in attendance a perfect ending.

“This was a coming-of-age moment for the new generation of MMA stars,” longtime British combat sports journalist Gareth Davies told ESPN. “It felt like a homecoming for the UFC after an absence, and I think it sparked people asking if we were at the golden age for British mixed martial arts.”

UFC president Dana White was clearly impressed, as he issued nine postfight bonuses instead of the usual four.

“I remember going to breakfast the next morning and I said, ‘Lads, we f—ing changed the game, haven’t we?'” said McCann.

For White, it was more like an epiphany.

“Tonight re-energized me and reminded me of what it’s like to do fights over in the U.K.,” White said during the postfight press conference.

Pimblett also realized that British MMA had reached a new high on that eventful night in London.

“It was a night that showed people how much the sport had evolved in the U.K.,” said Pimblett. “If you would have done that show here five years ago, I don’t think that many U.K. fighters would have won. It just shows how much better the U.K. scene has become.”

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HISTORY WILL BE made on Saturday night at Co-op Live, 22 years after Freeman walked into the UFC Octagon for the first time.

UFC 304 will be the first card to feature two English champions: Birmingham’s Leon Edwards will defend his welterweight championship against Belal Muhammad, while Salford’s Tom Aspinall puts his interim heavyweight title on the line against Curtis Blaydes.

If both emerge victorious, it would further cement the U.K.’s status as a global power in MMA.

Edwards and Aspinall are champions with vastly different journeys to similar destinations. Thanks, in no small part, to Freeman, Bisping and Hardy.

Aspinall was born into martial arts courtesy of a father, Andy, who competed in boxing, kickboxing, judo and wrestling and is a third-degree Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt.

“He [my father] was into MMA before there was a way to actually do MMA,” Aspinall told ESPN. “By the time MMA came around in the U.K., he was already too old and too injured to make a career out of it.”

Aspinall’s rise can be viewed as the culmination of the work of every British MMA fighter before him. A heavyweight who moves like a welterweight, possesses lights-out punching power and harnesses high-level grappling skills, Aspinall is the epitome of what it means to be a mixed martial artist.

And that’s all a fighter, who “grew up around factory workers and plumbers” in a “really blue collar area” a short drive away from the site of UFC 304, ever wanted to be.

“I never wanted to do anything else [growing up],” Aspinall said to ESPN. “As soon as I realized people weren’t working a regular job and doing [MMA] instead, I wanted to do it too.”

Aspinall credits Bisping as the guiding light.

“[Bisping’s] the blueprint of what it is to be from the U.K. and be a UFC fighter of the longest time,” Aspinall said, who sat in the nosebleeds of the Manchester Arena at UFC 204 and watched Bisping defend the middleweight title against Henderson and Edwards choke out Albert Tumenov. Less than four years after UFC 204, Aspinall made his UFC debut in Abu Dhabi with a first-round TKO win over Jake Collier.

Aspinall headlined the 2022 UFC Fight Night card in London — his first UFC fight in front of fans due to the COVID-19 pandemic — and also saw it as a turning point. The 31-year-old believes that UFC 304 will be another major step in influencing those involved in the sport regionally.

“I ain’t nothing special, I’m just a regular guy like anybody else,” Aspinall said. “But, sometimes, ordinary people can do extraordinary things. If I can inspire one person to think, ‘Well, I can do that,’ then I’ve done my job.”

Unlike Aspinall, whose family was native to England, Edwards is a transplant from Kingston, Jamaica. Edwards and his younger brother Fabian — a Bellator middleweight title contender — knew next to nothing about MMA. However, their upbringing with a father involved in, as Edwards called it, “questionable activities” made it necessary for him to learn how to fight.

“My dad was a gang leader in my area,” Edwards told The Guardian in 2023. “I was one of the few kids who had a bicycle and a skateboard.”

After his father was shot and killed when he was 14 over “something to do with money,” Leon drifted into a life of crime as a member of a local gang in Birmingham. Edwards says his mother wanted to save him from his father’s fate, so when the two were walking past an MMA gym under construction in 2008, she made a plea to her then 17-year-old son.

“They were going to train MMA fighters,” Edwards told ESPN in 2022. “My mom wanted me to join to get me off the streets. I didn’t really know what MMA was. There wasn’t much of it in the U.K. at the time. My mom could barely afford to pay membership fees, but somehow she made it work.”

Edwards took to the sport relatively quickly and had his first amateur fight eight months into training. He turned pro in 2011 and made his UFC debut in 2014. With every win and a few losses, Edwards was sharpening his raw skill set and figuring out the nuances of MMA. By 2016, everything began to click, as Edwards would go on a tear of 13 consecutive fights without a loss, including capturing the UFC welterweight title in 2022.

Edwards credits Bisping for showing him that everything he desired was tangible.

“There are a few people from back in the day who made me say OK, it’s possible to achieve this dream that I’m chasing,” Edwards said of Bisping’s influence on “UFC Countdown.” Edwards became the second English champion in UFC history to headline a pay-per-view, in a successful title defense against Kamaru Usman at UFC 286 in London in March 2023. Now, as the promotion returns to Manchester, Edwards is once again the headliner.

UFC 304 will be a litmus test to see how far the sport has come in the country and a snapshot of where it is going. Currently, the UFC roster has 26 fighters from Great Britain’s three countries — England, Scotland and Wales — and England (19) is the fifth-most-represented country in the promotion. It could be a celebration for champions Edwards and Aspinall with wins, while also serving as a testing ground to push forward another wave of contenders: Pimblett, UFC flyweight contender Muhammad Mokaev and UFC featherweight contender Arnold Allen.

“This is the golden generation of British MMA,” said Davies.