Sherdog’s 2024 Comeback Fighter of the Year

Everyone loves a good comeback story, and mixed martial arts over the years has offered fans many variations on the theme of a once-forgotten fighter thrusting themself back into the limelight through some combination of determination, skill and luck. Sometimes, as with Sherdog’s 2014 “Comeback Fighter of the Year,” Dominick Cruz, it is a case of a gifted but injury-prone fighter finally getting healthy enough to show what he can do over the course of a full year. Other times, a fighter whose best days were thought to be behind them, such as 2013 honoree Robbie Lawler, happens upon the key—a change of camps, weight class or some other, less easily defined variable—that opens a whole new chapter in their career.

Even rarer are the instances of a fighter returning after a literal, complete absence from the sport to approach or even recapture their previous status. Consider 2017 winner Georges St. Pierre, who came back after four years of retirement to throttle Michael Bisping and add an Ultimate Fighting Championship middleweight belt to his already impressive résumé as the greatest welterweight and one of the top pound-for-pound fighters of all time. (That year’s runner-up, Chan Sung Jung, who returned after three years of mandatory military service in his native South Korea and immediately reestablished himself as a featherweight contender and major star, would have won in almost any other year.)

2024 offered a wealth of impressive, inspiring career comebacks of both varieties, and the voting was the most deeply divided of any category in this year’s awards. Among those who garnered significant portions of the vote were Doo Ho Choi, who, like his countryman “The Korean Zombie” seven years ago, returned from his nation’s compulsory military service and reestablished himself as a fan favorite and reliable action merchant in the ultra-competitive UFC featherweight division with two violent TKO wins. Former UFC bantamweight champion Petr Yan entered 2024 on a three-fight losing streak and appeared to be finished as a factor in the title picture but righted the ship with a pair of victories over Top 10 opponents and exits the year with a clear road back to the top. The runner-up in this year’s voting, Charles Johnson, rebounded from a 2023 in which he went 0-3 and looked to be in imminent danger of losing his UFC roster slot, only to bounce back in a big way with four straight wins—three of them upsets—completing a trip from the fringes of the unemployment line to the fringes of the flyweight Top 10 in a single year.

That brings us to this year’s honoree. A little over two years ago, the UFC cut Youssef Zalal after a majority draw against Da'Mon Blackshear. His release was not terribly surprising; while he had begun his Octagon run with three straight wins, the draw against Blackshear capped off an 0-3-1 run, which was simply not enough to stay afloat in the UFC’s unforgiving featherweight and bantamweight divisions. Just 25 years old at the time, with obvious skills and an engagingly cocky persona, it seemed reasonable to think “The Moroccan Devil” might make his way back to a top-level promotion at some point.

For the next year and a half, Zalal disappeared from the radar of the average casual fan. However, while the UFC’s endless carousel of weekly events ground on through 2023, two things were happening. One, Zalal went back to the drawing board, all but moving in at his training headquarters, Factory X, and picking up three first-round stoppage wins in Colorado regional staple Sparta Combat League. At the same time, that 0-3-1 finishing kick in the UFC began to take on a different character thanks to the continued success of former opponents Blackshear, Sean Woodson and especially Ilia Topuria, who proceeded to absolutely brutalize the featherweight division on his way to capturing the title, staking a solid claim as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world and being named Sherdog’s 2024 Fighter of the Year.

Zalal made his return to the Octagon at UFC on ESPN “Ribas vs. Namajunas” on March 23 against Billy Quarantillo. Months before he made the walk to the cage in Las Vegas, however, there were already rumblings that Zalal was a changed fighter, as multiple Factory X teammates including UFC contenders Brandon Royval and Chris Gutierrez went out of their way in interviews to proclaim that Zalal would be back in the UFC soon, that he had taken his game to a different level and was giving everyone fits in the gym. Fighters big-upping their teammates is a practice as old as sport and usually to be taken with a grain of salt, but it was worth noting that the ones doing it in this case were some of his primary training partners, and were finding ways bring up Zalal in interviews about unrelated topics.

Apparently, Zalal’s teammates had been genuinely shocked by his progress as a fighter and were trying to prepare us, but we were surprised, nonetheless. It isn’t that Zalal’s basic profile as a fighter changed; he was, and remains, a big, athletic featherweight with solid kickboxing and a severely underrated offensive wrestling and grappling game. The difference is that everything seemed to have been fine-tuned, then paired with a new mental approach and a whole lot more killer instinct. Where the 2020-2022 version of “The Moroccan Devil” had sometimes struggled to win close rounds due to lack of pace and urgency, and had failed to pick up any wins inside the distance in his first UFC run despite being vastly more skilled than his first three opponents, Zalal was now a well-oiled machine. Against Quarantillo, Jarno Errens and Jack Shore, Zalal took command of the fights immediately, transitioning smoothly from striking to grappling in a way perfectly calculated to keep his opponents off balance and reeling. The result: three straight submission wins, the last two of them impressive enough to net “Performance of the Night” bonuses from his promotion.

Almost as important as the wins themselves, the impressive stoppages equated to more time on the microphone for the resurgent Zalal, and he took full advantage, treating fans to a barrage of good-humored smack talk, wide-eyed review of his own highlight reel finishes and general jubilation. Watched end-to-end, Zalal’s three Octagon appearances of 2024, and his interviews before and after the fights, feel like a celebration, a montage from a feel-good sports movie.

In less than a year’s time, the now 28-year-old has completed the transition from a UFC castoff to a rising fan favorite with enough in-cage success to make a reasonable call for ranked opposition in one of MMA’s deepest and most competitive divisions. It has been one hell of a fun ride, and 2025 figures to be a pivotal juncture for his career, but what is certain for now is Youssef Zalal is Sherdog's 2024 Comeback Fighter of the Year.