The more the Jon Jones vs. Tom Aspinall fight doesn’t come to fruition, the more faith fans will have lost in the two-weight champion, and his boss Dana White. It’s been almost two years since Jones won the undisputed heavyweight title, and 16 months since Aspinall won the interim belt. What’s more? Both have registered one title defense for their respective belts. Quite ridiculous to think about the fact that Jon Jones made Tom Aspinall defend his interim title. So with a deep sigh, we ask what has been asked a million times now—Is Jon Jones fighting Tom Aspinall?

Well, Dana White did say, “Listen, Jon Jones wants to fight. [It’s] just when and where is what we’re working on now,” at UFC 313 presser. However, MMA fans are tired of this limbo in the heavyweight division. Even Tom Aspinall has expressed his frustration multiple times now, on his YouTube video over Jon’s radio silence and preference for fighting Alex Pereira. Now fight veterans Josh Thomson and John McCarthy are a bit apprehensive about ‘Bones’ and his stature in the UFC promotion after all this ‘will they, won’t they’ drama.

During a recent episode of the Weighing In podcast, Thomson questioned the heavyweight king’s supposedly dwindling star power. He said, “The bottom line is, I feel like people right now would rather just see him go, so we can move on with the sport. This lingering around of ‘Oh am I gonna fight Tom Aspinall or not’ or I think that if he left, no one would care anymore. They’re like, ‘It’s good’. He’s gone now we can move on and the sport can start to take off. Do you know when people, kind of, like are just hanging around for too long? And they make it about them. He should I think he should try to get as much money as he possibly can to fight Tom Aspinall.”

Jones had a plan to fight Pereira and even voiced the same as well, but now that ‘Poatan’ has lost his light heavyweight belt against Magomed Ankalaev, this fight seems bleak. Thomson, however, thought that the fight against ‘Poatan’ would be more feasible for ‘Bones’. ‘The Punk’ also pointed out that unlike Conor McGregor or Sean O’Malley, Jones has never brought humungous PPV buys.

Thomson said, “He’s only got 1 million pay-per-view buys once. It was the second DC fight. He has never broken 1 million pay-per-view buys before.” Daniel Cormier vs Jon Jones 2 at UFC 214 was indeed trending towards a million PPV sales, but only had  860,000 buys as per MMA Mania. As for their first fight at UFC 182, it had 800,000 buys. However, Jones never crossed similar records of PPV sales as McGregor did.

On top of that, now the 37-year-old is holding up the HW division and not giving the interim heavyweight champ a chance to unify the belts. As for Alex Pereira’s moving up to HW, after his loss, the idea was subtly dismissed by White. He said during UFC 313 post-fight presser, “You’re trying to ask a guy to move up two weight classes to heavyweight and take on the greatest of all time… There are still tough guys to fight in the light heavyweight division.”

However, after ‘Poatan’s loss, Jones came out of the shadows and commented on a post made by the Brazilian. Guess who took the chance to challenge Jones? It was none other than  Tom Aspinall.

Tom Aspinall threw a challenge at Jon Jones

Alex Pereira addressed his loss to Magomed Ankalaev and talked to his fans through a video on Instagram. ‘Poatan’ was calm as ever, true to his stoic nature, and was having a good time with his team enjoying pizza. He said that he would take time to heal but would come back into the cage for his next challenge. However, Jones jumped into the comments stating his emotions about his prospective opponent’s loss.“Disappointed, I was looking forward to sharing the octagon with you.”, wrote ‘Bones’.

The Brit was on Jones’s heels and replied to his comment stating, “You got nowhere to run Jon.” On top of that, the new addition to this triangle feud is Magomed Ankalaev, who took his own set of jibes at Jones. He took to X to post the following, “Johnny’s steroid machine was very disappointed. I beat Alex, please fight big Tom Aspinall, stop running.” Then very cleverly he pounced on the opportunity of a call out to Aspinall and said, “Big Ank [handshake] Big Tom.”

Ankalaev made the move at the right time and fortunately for him, Aspinall agreed. The interim HW champ posted with “🤝” on his Instagram account in response to the Dagestani’s callout. So will Jones have to abide by Dana White and fight Aspinall or will the latter fight Ankalaev? Is Jones asking to be forgetting given his ‘lingering’ as Josh Thomson put it? Share your thoughts in the comments below.