Paddy Pimblett has been branded a "social media" fighter after he laboured to a questionable points win over Jared Gordon at UFC 282 last weekend.
Pimblett extended his unbeaten run to four fights in the promotion but has come in for criticism with many pundits insisting Gordon should have had his hands raised. And his fellow UFC star Matt Brown was thoroughly unimpressed, declaring that he wasn't as good as his hype level.
Pimblett is one of the most talked about fighters in the division, and has garnered over 2.4million followers on Instagram despite having multiple accounts taken down. And Brown believes his fighting career is little more than a "hobby", blasting him as just a social media fighter.
“He’s a professional social media guy, his hobby is fighting,” Brown told MMAFighting. “What else would he say? He doesn’t have a real answer for it. Of course he’s going to go ahead and go with the narrative that he won. If he admits defeat, it makes him look worse. It makes us sit here and talk about it more. That’s all he really wants. He wants more clicks, he wants more views.
"He’s a social media professional. He’s an amateur fighter. What I’m getting at, I wouldn’t expect him to say anything different publicly. The only way he’s going to improve is if he goes back and does some soul searching in his room by himself, not on social media, not on YouTube. Not on whatever TikTok f***ing s*** he’s famous on.
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"He searches deep within himself and makes some changes. He’s going to have to decide this is what he wants. He’s going to have to say, ‘Do I want to be a social media superstar or do I want to be a fighter?’”
Brown is not a potential opponent for Pimblett, competing at welterweight as opposed to lightweight where the former Cage Warriors champion fights. And he reckons that little has changed for the Brit after he won Cage Warriors gold all the way back in 2016, when he was just 21-years-old.
“So many things in his game are so far behind that he almost has to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch, and go back to Cage Warriors and try again almost,” Brown said. “Because he’s in the snake pit now, if they move him up. I don’t think they’re going to move him up. I think after that performance, he’s going to stay down fighting in the 20 to 30 [ranked] guys, maybe even lower than that. He’s going to have a very hard time.”
