Oban Elliott: ‘Nothing Beats That Chip On Your Shoulder’

Right from the start, things following his dominant finish of Hafez at UFC 309 didn’t go as he’d hoped. Addressing a lingering ankle injury kept him out of action in the early part of the year. The shift to being a full-time fighter without a “day job” also put natural restrictions on how much he could train resulted in Elliott being in the gym too much and running himself down.

Initially paired with Ramiz Brahimaj at the end of May in Las Vegas, the Dana White’s Contender Series graduate was re-shuffled to the mid-June fight card in Baku, Azerbaijan when his visa didn’t come through in time to make his original date. Instead of facing Brahimaj, Elliott was matched up against fellow DWCS alum Seokhyeon Ko, who was making his promotional debut.

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The change in dates and destinations left Elliott without his regular coaches and scrambling to find anyone that would make the trip to Baku to be in his corner, which left the welterweight hopeful feeling a little unsettled. Despite all the shifts and changes, he fully anticipated rising to the occasion once his music hit and it was time to make the walk to the Octagon, telling his manager as much in the dressing room when he checked in with his client, recognizing the uneasiness on his face.

And then Elliott was hustled into his walkout to the Octagon as the preliminary card had been a slew of decisions and the broadcast was running up against its time window.

“Surely, you’ve had it where you turn up to work and you just go, ‘I need to go home; I’m f******!’” he asked with a laugh, reflecting on the avalanche of issues that, combined with having beaten up his body by overtraining, left him in a miserable state prior to stepping in with Ko. “It’s no different. I’m there, I don’t know who’s in my corner, fighting a guy I know nothing about that everybody says I should smash, so I’m like, ‘F** it!’

“I get two boys from Germany who I was training with a couple of months prior to come, but they’re not my coaches, and I don’t care what anyone says: if you haven’t got your coaches with you, it’s like a dog without its owner. I was looking around in the training room thinking, ‘This is wrong.’ It felt like cheating on your girlfriend; d’you know what I mean?

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“Everything that could have possibly gone wrong right up until the walkout has gone wrong,” added Elliott, who dropped a unanimous decision to the South Korean newcomer, bringing his momentum to a halt. “The fight starts and my head is still in the changing rooms. My rhythm is off.”

At the time, it was viewed as a massive upset, as Elliott was a huge betting favorite with three prior UFC victories and Ko was stepping into the Octagon for the first time. Since then, “The Korean Tyson” has registered a second straight dominant victory where he used his grappling to drown his opponent, Phil Rowe, establishing himself as an intriguing dark horse in the 170-pound weight division heading into this year and shifting perceptions of Elliott’s loss to him in the process.

Eager to put his poor showing behind him as quickly as possible, “The Welsh Gangster” lobbied the promotion for a quick turnaround, with a date in Perth against another member of the DWCS Class of ’24, Jonathan Micallef, positioned across from him.

“They said, ‘Perth’ and I said, ‘Great,’” began Elliott, diving into the details surrounding what was expected to be his second appearance of 2025. “I’m sick as a dog for the whole of camp; I think ‘I’ll shake it’ and it just kept creeping back. The week I was leaving, I felt a flu coming on again and I thought, ‘It’s 30 degrees in Australia; if I do have a cold, the hot weather will change it’ and boy was I f****** wrong, mate.”

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Elliott advised the UFC of his illness as soon as he arrived and was given whatever medication he could take in order to try and combat the symptoms. Rather than feeling better, he started feeling worse, and when a doctor was sent to his room to diagnose the problem, it was discovered that Elliott had pneumonia and the fight was immediately scrapped.

Bedridden with a sick bucket next to him and white as a ghost, the Welshman was made to feel more ill when he saw Micallef on social media questioning the legitimacy of Elliott’s illness and desire to fight while angling to quickly get booked against someone else. Rather than hustling “The Captain” into another matchup, the UFC opted to keep the pairing intact, re-booking the duo for this month’s fight card in Sydney.

“He thought he was out of the woods, but guess who’s flying all the way back to his country to fill him in? This ****! Guess who hasn’t slept properly since because I’m thinking about him? This ****!” Elliott said, grinning through gritted teeth, the situation clearly not having sat well with him at all.

“I hold a grudge, me. Christmas in two days and I do not give a f***, mate. All I care about is beating this guy until he is unrecognizable when he goes home. That is all I’ve been thinking about while he was off ‘oh I’ll fight this guy, I’ll fight Jeremiah Wells.’ You thought you were out of the woods!

“Not so fast, Chicken. Hold your f****** horses.”

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Being horribly ill and not getting to redeem himself after his disappointing performance in Azerbaijan was bad enough for Elliott, but what really set him sideways was seeing Micallef questioning his integrity afterwards.

“I always think that if you’re the type of person to assume that another UFC fighter is gonna bottle it, that shows me that you’re the type of guy that would bottle it because that would never enter my head,” he said. “I would never assume that of another man.”

As much as the combination of losing to Ko and things breaking the way they did in Perth were miserable in the moment, the third-year welterweight recognized that it’s simply added more fuel to his fire heading into 2026.

“I am 10 times the man for it,” Elliott said of his miserable year. “Every setback I’ve had in my life, it’s been the fuel to go. I word-for-word said it — John Gooden came to my house and I said, ‘If I do drop a result, I do lose one, that’s just gonna piss me off even more and push me further to where I wanted to go in the first place,’ and that is exactly what has happened.

“Chael Sonnen said it best, ‘Never piss off a gangster, and he is gonna find out why you don’t.’”

Not that he needed additional motivation or drive heading into what is now a grudge match for him with Micallef in Sydney, but the end-of-January assignment date also allowed the 12-3 talent fighting out of Merthyr Tydfil to channel the emotions from what is always a difficult time into his preparations.

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“Honestly, Christmas is the most difficult time of year for me because January 5th marks the day my dad died, and this time of year — I don’t mean to get upset now, but it does get me,” said Elliott, pausing to wipe tears from his eyes. “He took his own life, and this time of life marks the beginning of the end of him.

Elliott’s father was the one that first introduced him and his brother to the UFC and set them about training, with the young lads wanting to do anything else but in those early days. Once his father passed, Elliott dove into chasing his mixed martial arts dreams as a way to honor his dad, with his signing with the promotion following his hard-fought win on Season 6 of Dana White’s Contender Series standing as a huge moment for him and his family.

Now, he’s preparing to step into the Octagon two days after what would have been his father’s 64th birthday, against someone that has gotten under his skin, and it has him chomping at the bit to make the extended voyage back to Australia.

“I made my debut in February, and it was the best because I was in a training camp and I was focused and it takes my mind away from it,” said Elliott. “Last year, I was injured and I remember going through Christmas thing, I’m injured and I thought, ‘I just hit the highest of highs and it’s still upsetting; this time of year is still upsetting.’

“This time, I’m in the training camp and it’s good for me to keep my mind at ease. What a better way to honor him two days after his birthday than beating the f*** out of this guy, man.

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“I am just ready to f****** go, man,” he added. “This is my life and I’ve got a chip on my shoulder now. I am raring to go. I’m not looking past nothing. I’m just looking — I don’t care about anything besides going in there and destroying this man; that is all I think about.

“Nothing beats revenge! Nothing beats that chip on your shoulder!”