Liz Carmouche wants to know why she isn’t fighting for the PFL flyweight championship next and why Dakota Ditcheva isn’t standing across from her when she returns to the PFL cage in San Diego on June 27.
Carmouche won the 2025 season of the PFL with wins over Ilara Joanne, Elora Dana and Jena Bishop, a tournament that did not include 2024 champion Ditcheva. As 2026 started, and PFL transitioned to a new format moving away from seasons, Carmouche expected to face the English flyweight for the belt in 2026. Instead, she’s battling UFC veteran Viviane Araujo on June 27, while Ditcheva returns a month later versus Denise Kielholtz.
Speaking with MMA Fighting on Tuesday, Carmouche admitted she doesn’t have a clue as to why her next fight isn’t for the belt.
“I wish I could answer that. I can’t [laughs]. I’ve been asking the same thing,” Carmouche said. “I thought coming out of the tournament that the only match-up that made sense was last year’s champion versus the year prior champion, but they have a different agenda.”
Carmouche said “to some degree” she was surprised to see Ditcheva booked against a different opponent four weeks later instead of having them fight each other, but already expected that to be the path since PFL first booked Ditcheva vs. Kielholtz in January.
“As far as I’m being told, it’s at her pace and her wants, not mine,” Carmouche said.
Does that mean Ditcheva is avoiding her?
“It certainly seems that way,” Carmouche said. “Of course, I want to be fighting the best and prove that I’m the one that deserves to be having that belt and to be a contender for the belt, if not the belt holder. But I certainly understand they want to protect their future. They invested a lot of money into her, and she’s the face of PFL. So you certainly don’t want it to give it to somebody who’s in their 40s, you want to give it to the young 20-year-old.”
Sooner or later, Carmouche believes “it’s an inevitable outcome” that they will fight each other under.
“I think the only way that it doesn’t happen is if she decides that she wants to leave PFL and go to the UFC,” Carmouche said. “That’s the only way, in my mind, to slide past and get out of this.”
Disappointed with the direction things are going by not facing off with Ditcheva, Carmouche said she feels the uncrowned flyweight champion in PFL.
“In my mind, I’m the most recent champion,” Carmouche said. “The way that the format was before is if you won the title in 2023, you start in 2024 and it’s a clean slate, and everybody has an equal opportunity to fight to be the 24 champion, and then 25 and so on and so forth, right? It doesn’t carry over from the previous year. So if I was the last holding and now we’re going back to the original MMA format, in my mind, it makes sense that that is the current champion. Or at the very least, we should just be unranked and everybody’s fighting for a rank this year. At this point, only the females that have fought in 2026 should be ranked and the rest of us should be unranked and trying to earn the right to be there.”
Carmouche remains fully focused on beating Araujo later this month, an “exciting” opponent “that throws down and continues coming forward no matter what.” Having said that, “Girl-Rilla” has also envisioned how she would beat Ditcheva in MMA.
“I think that Dakota is another person that is able to push the tempo and make an exciting fight,” Carmouche said. “One thing she’s proven when she fought Bishop and a few others is everybody had questioned her ground game and thought that as long you can get her to the ground, you can finish her. And that was proven that’s not necessarily true. So I think that striking-wise, we can throw a lot of back and forth and a lot of variability in there, but I also have faith in my ability to drag people into deep waters. And once you get to that fourth or fifth round, that’s when I really start to wear people down and get them down in themselves and they make mistakes I’m able to capitalize on. And I could see it being a solid finish against the cage, where it’s a TKO, or even a submission on the ground.”
