Comparisons between Anderson Silva and Israel Adesanya have been common in fan middleweight GOAT debates in recent years.
Those discussions intensified after Adesanya defeated “The Spider” via unanimous decision at UFC 234 in February 2019 and then captured the middleweight belt later that year — this despite Silva having twice as many title defenses as his counterpart overall. On Saturday, after Sean Strickland defeated “The Last Stylebender” to claim the belt in a massive upset at UFC 293, Silva sent a strong message regarding the GOAT debate to his 4.9 million Instagram followers.
“I'm the one in charge of this s—t here, and you're not going to open your mouth again to compare yourself to me in this s—t,” Silva wrote in a message that has since been deleted. “Do you understand? I'm the one in charge of this s—t here.”
Shortly after posting, “The Spider” changed the caption to some skull and hawk emojis and shared a video from one of his favorite movies, Tropa de Elite (The Elite Squad). In that movie, Captain Nascimento, who is played by Wagner Moura, famously says: “You’ll never be the one! Never!” It was the same line Silva said when he defeated Rich Franklin for the second time at UFC 77.
Silva left the UFC with several records in the middleweight division. The Brazilian has the most title defenses in the history of the division, with 10, all of them consecutively. Silva also has the longest reign in UFC history, in any category, at 2,457 days. He still has the most submissions (nine), most knockouts (seven) and most knockdowns (10) in title fights in UFC history. “The Spider” also has the most wins (11) in middleweight title fights. Adesanya has five title defenses and eight title fight wins at middleweight, being surpassed only by Silva in that category.
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