Bellator 267: Michael Page Prefers Third Lima Fight to Title Shot

Despite beating a former champ and the #1 contender in Bellator’s welterweight division on Friday night in London, hometown favorite Michael Page isn’t exactly keen on a title shot coming next.

Instead, “MVP” has his eye on the completion of his trilogy with Douglas Lima — the man he just defeated in the Bellator 267 main event.

“In all honesty, I would love to run that back,” Page (20-1) said following the fight, which saw him earn a split decision victory. Referring to himself as “petty” in terms of his need to win definitively, the British star added that “a few more things, and I push him right over the edge and he doesn’t get back up.”

The desire to run the fight back and complete the trilogy — Lima knocked Page out in the pair’s first meeting in 2019 — even supersedes a potential title shot against Yaroslav Amosov.

“I’ve been telling people from the beginning, I feel like no one really listens: I don’t care about the title. It’s a belt, who cares, man?” Page exclaimed. “How many people who are title holders are nowhere near as popular as I am? Belts don’t mean anything. It does, obviously, but to me it doesn’t. I swear to you, that moment there, there are so many belt holders in Bellator that couldn’t pull that off. I can say that with confidence, there is a lot of people who cannot pull off what I did today.”

Page feels that the title isn’t what fans want to see him pursue anyway. “I feel like people are drawn to me for my enjoyment of the sport, and not because I’m chasing anything,” he opined. “It’s more about me and my journey. I want to prove things to myself, and I didn’t get to prove that today.”

“I won, but I didn’t get to prove what I wanted to prove,” he added. That’s to make Lima’s “eyes roll in the back of his head,” and for him to “just not get back up.”

Watch the full Bellator 267 post-fight press scrum with Michael Page above. More coverage from the event can be found below.