UFC returns this Saturday, September 5, to the Accor Arena in Paris with one of those cards that perfectly explain how far the map of European MMA has changed.
The absolute protagonist will be Salahdine Parnasse.
One of the best fighters who competed outside of UFC will not have a conventional debut. No preliminaries, an opponent of adaptation and progressive construction. Parnasse enters directly through the front door: main event in his country, five rounds and Dan Hooker waiting on the other side.
It's a huge gamble on UFC's part and also a much more serious test than the odds may suggest.
Parnasse arrives with a 23-2 record and after building much of his prestige outside of UFC. Champion in two KSW divisions, technically complete, fast, dangerous to punch and perfectly capable of turning the fight around by grappling, the Frenchman represents exactly the signing profile that can skip several steps.
UFC seems to think the same.
Placing him directly against Hooker means immediately checking whether we are dealing with a good signing or a contender capable of establishing himself from day one among the best lightweights in the world.
On paper, Parnasse should be superior in speed and freshness.
But there is a variable that is difficult to measure: Dan Hooker has been surviving for years in one of the most brutal ecosystems in UFC.
The New Zealander has shared a cage with Dustin Poirier, Islam Makhachev, Arnold Allen, Mateusz Gamrot, Arman Tsarukyan and Benoît Saint Denis, among others. He has won, lost, received a lot of punishment and has experienced situations that Parnasse has simply not yet experienced inside the octagon.
And therein lies the real attraction of the main event.
Parnasse is probably the fighter with the most tools currently, but he will have to prove it during a potentially long fight against a man who is extraordinarily difficult to get out of a fight.
Hooker needs to turn the perfect night UFC seems to have prepared for his new French star into something unpleasant.
Survive the first few minutes, force Parnasse to work, use his length, punish when the Frenchman closes the distance and see what happens when a rookie accustomed to dominating finds himself in the fourth round of a UFC main event.
Hooker's accumulated wear and tear is impossible to ignore and makes Parnasse a rightful favorite.
But reducing this fight to "young star vs. finished veteran" would be too straightforward.
Precisely because Hooker has spent so many years facing the elite, this fight can immediately answer the big question around the Frenchman.
What level does Salahdine Parnasse really have within UFC?
The co-main event maintains the French prominence with Farès Ziam against Axel Sola.
It's an especially interesting fight because it pits two different ways to gain minutes.
Ziam has spent years developing a style that is quite effective for controlling distances, reducing errors and driving close fights to the cards. He doesn't always need to produce great moments to appropriate an assault.
Alone she needs to try to break that comfort.
He has pressure, power, and enough grappling tools to transform the fight into something more physical. If he allows Ziam to calmly mark the distance for fifteen minutes, he will probably be competing exactly where his opponent wants.
If he manages to close spaces, generate clinch, increase the pace and force Ziam to react constantly, the fight can change a lot.
There is also an important component: both are French.
Paris will be assured of a local winner in the co-main event, but it will also necessarily lose one of its lightweight projects.
Michael "Venom" Page will be another of the big names of the night.
MVP faces Nursulton Ruziboev at middleweight in a fight where geometry probably matters more than volume.
Page continues to be one of the strangest strikers to groom in MMA. His distance, lateral displacements, explosive tackles, and ability to hit from unconventional positions make chasing him extremely uncomfortable.
Ruziboev has enough size, power, and finishing ability to change the fight with one action.
Your problem will be to find it.
If Page manages to set up a slow and long fight, entering, scoring and disappearing before the answer, he can force the Uzbek to chase shadows for a good part of the fifteen minutes.
Ruziboev needs to close the cage, dirty the exchanges and, if the opportunity arises, incorporate clinch or grappling. A purely tactical long-range fight seems to favor MVP much more.
Daniil Donchenko and Punahele Soriano present one of the most difficult confrontations to project.
Donchenko represents youth and projection. Soriano, experience and a power that can never disappear from analysis.
The key for the American is probably not to accept an excessively clean fight. Pressing, threatening takedowns and turning every minute into a physical test can be much more profitable than trying to prove who has better striking.
Soriano has been inconsistent during his career in UFC, but he remains the typical veteran capable of ruining a prospect's rise if he is not yet prepared for certain situations.
Kurtis Campbell will try to recover from the first loss of his career against Trevor Peek.
Peek offers exactly what it has been offering since it appeared in UFC: chaos.
He is aggressive, hits hard and can turn any technically ordered fight into a succession of exchanges that are difficult to control.
Campbell should have more variety, length, and resources to decide where the fight takes place. His main enemy may be precisely accepting the fight Peek wants.
The more orderly the matchup, the more it should favor Campbell.
Losene Keita also faces an important fight against Muhammad Naimov.
Keita arrived in UFC with huge expectations and now he needs to start translating all that potential into the octagon. His explosiveness, speed and power are still top-notch attributes, but Naimov can force him to work in much less comfortable areas through clinch and fighting.
For Keita, the priority should be to constantly regain space.
If he manages to keep Naimov in front and turn the fight into a speed matchup, he can do a lot of damage. If he ends up spending long periods glued to the cage, the situation will be completely different.
And the preliminaries are far from being a simple formality.
Morgan Charrière vs. Felipe Lima could very well be part of a main card.
Charrière will have the crowd completely behind him, enough power to do damage and experience in high-pressure fights. Lima, however, is one of those fighters capable of producing winning minutes at virtually any stage.
He can punch, press, work from the clinch and switch to grappling when the development of the fight demands it.
It's probably one of the most technically complete matchups of the entire night.
In heavyweight Mario Pinto appears against Ryan Spann.
Pinto has a magnificent opportunity to accelerate his career.
Spann is still very dangerous during the first few minutes. He has power, experience and the ability to find finishes when a mistake appears. But he has also shown for many years that his performance can deteriorate when the opponent survives that first threat.
Pinto needs patience.
Not to prove that he can trade with Spann, but to force him to work.
If he manages to take the fight into the second and third rounds without having received significant damage, the balance can progressively tip towards the Portuguese.
Oumar Sy vs. Modestas Bukauskas presents another European duel with interesting implications in the light heavyweight.
Sy has the physique and wrestling to make Bukauskas' night extremely uncomfortable. The Frenchman can close distance, work against the cage and chain takedowns.
Bukauskas needs exactly the opposite: space.
He has evolved a lot during his second stint in UFC and has enough striking to punish too predictable tackles. It will be a fight where the position inside the cage may end up being more important than the strike statistics.
Nathaniel Wood, on the other hand, faces a rather thankless situation.
After winning seven of his last eight fights in UFC, he faces undefeated Pavel Andrusca, who comes in as a substitute to make his debut.
For Andrusca it is an extraordinary opportunity.
For Wood, practically everything is risk.
Winning means doing what is expected of a much more experienced fighter. Losing means delivering a good part of the momentum built up over years against a debutant.
Such confrontations are often more dangerous than the names of the participants indicate.
And for the Spanish public there will be a particularly important fight.
Fabià Sintes makes his debut in UFC against Michael Aljarouj.
Sintes comes after building a six-match winning streak and becoming a WOW champion, but the jump to the octagon inevitably brings another dimension.
Aljarouj has power and will compete at home.
The Spaniard needs to avoid turning his debut into a boxing event at striking distance. His advantage may lie precisely in having more ways to win: close distance, work from the clinch, generate scrambles and look for positions from which his submission game appears.
It doesn't look like a fight designed to give him an easy debut.
And that also makes it much more interesting.
A victory for Sintes in Paris would mean starting its UFC career by immediately passing a real test and adding another Spanish name to a company where Ilia Topuria and Joel Álvarez have greatly increased the visibility of national MMA.
The card is completed with Nora Cornolle against Klaudia Sygula, Matthieu Duclos against Luis Felipe Dias and Delphine Benouaich against Sofia Montenegro.
They are less mediatic fights, but they perfectly represent what UFC is trying to build with its European events.
It is no longer just a matter of traveling to Paris and placing two Frenchmen in the preliminaries.
The company has enough European talent to build practically an entire card around fighters from the continent.
France will have Parnasse, Ziam, Sola, Charrière, Sy, Aljarouj, Cornolle, Duclos and Benouaich. Spain will be represented by Sintes, Portugal by Pinto, Belgium by Keita, United Kingdom by Page, Campbell and Wood and different European talents will complete a night with a very marked identity.
But everything will end up revolving around Salahdine Parnasse.
UFC doesn't usually hand over a five-round main event to a debutant by accident.
Paris can be the beginning of a new European star or a demonstration that there is a difference between dominating outside UFC and doing it immediately against veterans who have spent half their lives competing among the best.
Dan Hooker will be in charge of discovering it.
And perhaps that is the best way to define UFC Paris.
A night built to celebrate the enormous moment of European MMA, but headed by a question that can only be answered when the door of the octagon closes:
Is Salahdine Parnasse as good as he looks?