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2025 was no exception, offering us numerous examples of men and women breaking through in big ways under the brightest lights. Several rising stars earned votes from the Sherdog staff including welterweight contender Michael Morales, who notched first-round knockouts of Gilbert Burns and Sean Brady, extending his spotless record to 7-0 in the UFC and 19-0 overall and positioning himself for a likely shot at becoming Ecuador’s first UFC champ next year.
However, when the dust settled and the votes were counted, there was a runaway winner for this year’s most notable breakthrough talent: Joshua Van, who also happens to be Sherdog’s male fighter of the year. While several fighters have won “Breakthrough Fighter of the Year” and then gone on to win “Fighter of the Year” later, including Jon Jones, Conor McGregor and Israel Adesanya, Van joins Alex Pereira (2022) as just the second man to win both awards in the same year. To add to Van’s virtual trophy haul, he also accounted for one-half of Sherdog’s “Fight of the Year” alongside Brandon Royval. To say that it was a banner year for the 24-year-old from Myanmar by way of Houston would be an understatement.
Since the elements that made Van the signature fighter of 2025 and his role in the most memorable fight of the year have both been covered beautifully in the articles referenced above, perhaps it is worth it to focus here on the things that made Van’s banner year seem like a breakthrough. On this topic, your friendly correspondent can offer some perspective. Being based in Houston myself, and as a proponent of Fury Fighting Championship as perhaps America’s best regional promotion over the last five years, I had a front-row seat for his rise as a prospect—literally, as I probably saw half of his pre-UFC bouts in person.
It did not take an expert analyst to peg Van, even from his fourth or fifth professional bout, as a future UFC talent, maybe even a future contender. It was never that he was unbeatable—he took an early loss and had a few scares even in fights he ended up winning by blowout—but that he was so young, so physically talented and most important of all, such an obvious student of the game. The way Van absorbed instruction from his corner, the way in which he improved in huge leaps from one fight to the next, and the way he balanced confidence with humility even as the spotlight grew steadily brighter, all pointed to a fighter with enormous upside. There was no question of whether Van had the talent to make an impact at the next level; only of when.
The same held true after Van landed in the UFC in early 2023 as a 21-year-old phenom. All of the skills were there, the intangibles were off the charts, and the only question seemed to be whether it was too much, too soon for a developing prospect. Van went 5-1 in his first six Octagon outings, with the lone loss, against Charles Johnson last July, coming in a fight that Van had been winning until he was caught early in Round 3 by the dangerous “InnerG.”
To those who were tracking Van's arc like that of a rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, that setback almost seemed like a mixed blessing, as it forced, or at least allowed, the UFC to slow his ascension just a bit. Van closed out last year by bouncing back from the Johnson loss with wins over Edgar Chairez and Cody Durden.
That brought Van to the beginning of 2025, a year in which he was reasonably expected to keep up his winning ways, and perhaps, if everything broke the right way, position himself for a shot at the belt sometime in 2026. Instead, Van kicked things into high gear, winning his first two fights of 2025 in dominant fashion and setting himself up for what ended up being a sprint to the summit. The turning point came when Van stepped up on ultra-short notice to face Royval at UFC 317. It was a blistering three rounds of action, the kind of contest that elevates the winner’s stock without truly hurting the loser’s, and it came just three weeks after Van’s win over Bruno Silva.
Coming as it did immediately before the co-main event and Alexandre Pantoja’s successful title defense against Kai Kara-France, the win positioned him as the new face in a men’s flyweight division that was desperate for one. Thanks in part to that performance, and in part to Pantoja already having fought every other contender in the division, several of them more than once, Van was suddenly the next guy up, and his shot was scheduled for Dec. 6 and the final pay-per-view event of the UFC on ESPN era, UFC 323.
The outcome of UFC 323 co-headliner was nobody’s storybook ending, as Pantoja came down awkwardly and injured his arm just 26 seconds into their contest. Fans and media have been divided on how much credit Van should get for such a victory, and the new champ will certainly have a lot to prove in his first title defense, whether that ends up being against a recuperated Pantoja or one of the half-dozen other sharks circling the tank, but here’s the truth: Van might have won this award even if he had lost to Pantoja that night, or even if the fight had been scheduled for January and we didn't yet know who was going to win.
Much like the rest of his career up to this year, Van’s 2025 was an example of a “Fearless” young talent always believing he was ready for the next, bigger challenge, and being right more often than not. That feeling of a rising talent leveling up faster than even his most ardent backers would have predicted, and the way in which Van seized his destiny in his own hands, are why the UFC men’s flyweight division is suddenly a very interesting place indeed, and it’s why Josh Van is Sherdog’s “Breakthrough Fighter of the Year” for 2025.