NEWS

Traveling, Testing Himself
By: Daniel Vreeland

In his five-fight professional career, Eli Aronov has seen a lot of things. He’s seen tough gritty fifteen-minute fights. He’s seen big finishes that happened in no time. He’s heard the large crowds of Bellator cheer for him. But what he hasn’t seen is a cage outside of his homeland of Israel.

When Aronov steps into the cage this Friday at Unified MMA 45 in Alberta, it’ll be the first time he’s fought on foreign soil. However, he’s not worried about the nerves at all, because he’s dealt with exciting environments before.

“It’s exciting, there is no doubt about it. But I’ve fought in Bellator – it was in Israel – but I fought in Bellator and there was a ten thousand person crowd over there,” Aronov explained. “The arena was crazy. Full News article >>

Eli Aronov: Improved from unranked to #10 prospect

Aronov was someone I had deep down of my watchlist, as he was 5-0 coming into this week and has great backgrounds in both Greco-Roman and Freestyle wrestling. However, all of those wins had come on the notoriously weak Israeli MMA scene, including a win on the Bellator prelims against a 2-2 opponent back in 2019 when the promotion put on an event in Israel. I also had some concerns about his height, as he’s just 5’10 but had been fighting exclusively at light heavyweight. He erased all those worries this week by taking his first international fight with Unified MMA in Canada, where he was given a very hard debut matchup against deadly finisher Mariusz Ksiazkiewicz (10-1), whose only loss came by decision in the 2020 Contender Series in a fight where he broke his hand and had recorded consecutive 1st-round KOs of strong opponents to win a title for Unified and make his LFA debut as the main event. Full News Article >>