Something is clearly off between Michael Bisping and Tom Aspinall, and the MMA community has taken notice.
A clip began circulating on social media this week showing an apparent contrast between Bisping’s current commentary on Aspinall’s prolonged eye poke recovery and remarks he made roughly five months prior. Someone even tagged Bisping directly, asking him to explain the shift.
In a recent episode of his Believe You Me podcast, Bisping, alongside co-host Paul Felder, directed pointed criticism at the interim UFC heavyweight champion, who has remained sidelined following an eye injury sustained in the octagon.
The comments were notable not just for their content, but for the apparent reversal from a man who once counted Aspinall among his closer associates in the sport.
“I haven’t talked to Tom. I don’t know this, but it just seems like that whole situation with Cyril Gane, got him real bitter, got him real angry,” Felder said. “I don’t know, man. It feels like he’s got real big, real quick. And now he just thinks he’s above and beyond competing in the UFC. And it’s like, dude, you haven’t competed really much in three years.”
At the center of the debate is how much detail Aspinall has chosen to share about the nature of his injury and recovery timeline. Despite maintaining an active presence on YouTube where he regularly posts content, the champion has offered little in the way of specifics about his medical situation. That apparent contradiction is not sitting well with Bisping.
“He just said he’s still not clear to compete. He’s been very vague with the details,” Bisping noted. “He’s got a YouTube channel. He posts content all the time. You talk about it, you know, the procedures that he had, the operations, whatever they were.”
The former UFC middleweight champion went a step further, drawing a comparison to his own experience with a serious eye procedure, a scleral buckle surgery, which he described as a significant and physically demanding operation.
“I had a surgery, a very, very serious surgery,” Bisping said. “Look at the scleral buckle. It’s gross what they do to the eyeball. I don’t know what he had, but he hasn’t talked about that. I had that surgery, recovered, came back, and had a match in a shorter amount of time than what it’s taking this whole eye poke saga.”
At one point, he acknowledged that his relationship with Aspinall has noticeably cooled.
“I know Tom, we used to have a close relationship. We don’t talk these days,” Bisping admitted. “He was a great guy, but I don’t, just maybe, I don’t know, you look between the lines. There’s something f**king weird going on. That’s what it looks like. That’s what it sounds like.”
Felder largely reinforced Bisping’s perspective throughout the segment, adding a second voice to the criticism.
A post directed at Bisping on social media included footage from approximately five months earlier in which the former champion appeared to hold a considerably more sympathetic view of Aspinall’s situation, making the current commentary all the more glaring by comparison.
He had said, “The one thing you can’t do with an eye is rush. That is one big lesson that I learnt. Because I did that. I rushed back too soon. I rushed back to sparring, I rushed back to competition. And I never saw with that eye again. So Tom has got to take his time. And if he’s having a surgery, he’s definitely got to be out for at lease a few months.”
In the recent podcast episode, Bisping seemed at least partially aware that the segment might generate a direct response from Aspinall himself. Near the end of the discussion, he Bisping quipped, “I’ll probably get a text now.”
