Francis Ngannou Called the Upset Before Anyone Else Did

Francis Ngannou doesn’t just watch fights—he reads them like a book before they’re written. On Monday, the former UFC heavyweight champion revealed he’d put real money on Justin Gaethje to shock Ilia Topuria at UFC Freedom 250, a bet that looked laughable to just about everyone else on the planet.

Topuria was sitting as a 6-to-1 favorite. That’s the kind of gap where sportsbooks and analysts are essentially in agreement: this shouldn’t even be close. Finding an“expert”willing to predict a Gaethje upset would’ve been like finding a needle in a haystack. But Ngannou saw something the conventional wisdom missed. When he looked at those odds, his instinct fired: something’s wrong here. This is Justin Gaethje, the guy who shows up every single time—loss or win—and leaves pieces of himself in the cage. He’s got this thing where he reaches into opponents and takes what he needs to win. Being counted out? That made no sense to him.

So Ngannou bet on it. Real money. And when Gaethje pulled off the impossible, Ngannou was grinning ear to ear about the payday it bought him.“Thanks to him, I had a wonderful day. I’m having a beautiful week,”he told TMZ Sports, flashing the kind of smile only accurate prediction can produce.

But here’s where it gets interesting: Ngannou wasn’t just lucky on the main event. He’d also called the Ciryl Gane versus Alex Pereira co-main in March, predicting almost exactly how it would unfold. He even thought Pereira could’ve lasted one more round. That’s not a lucky guess—that’s pattern recognition at a level most people simply don’t possess. It’s the kind of fight intelligence that comes from years inside the sport, understanding not just technique but temperament, timing, and the invisible edges that separate fighters.

The event itself was stellar, Ngannou said. Good fights, entertaining moments. But the main event? That was transcendent. And apparently, for anyone paying attention to what Ngannou was actually saying—not what the oddsmakers were selling—it was predictable all along.