Former UFC featherweight champion Jose Aldo announced his retirement from MMA, although Aldo still had one bout left on his UFC contract the promotion agreed to release him.
Jose Aldo is among the greatest mixed martial artists in this era. Aldo had been active for nearly two decades, starting in 2004 when he began training.
Aldo beat many UFC veterans in his career, including Frankie Edgar, Urijah Faber, Chan Sung Jung, Cub Swanson, Chad Mendes, Ricardo Lamas, Mark Hominick, Kenny Florian, Jeremy Stephens, and Renato Moicano. Aldo was the inaugural UFC featherweight champion and successfully defended the title seven times after that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2JcBY2OuG8
Aldo was part of Meca World Vale Tudo 12 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. During his time there, he was especially blood thirsty and had ended Anderson Silverio via soccer kicks.
One interesting modern fact is that Gilbert Burns was actually very close to getting disqualified during his contest against Khamzat Chimaev for trying to utilize this exact technique.
https://twitter.com/JonnGrey/status/1551790858936012800
He landed some quick, devastating soccer kicks to knock his opponent out. In the footage, you can witness that he did not stop for a moment when he started hitting his opponent with soccer kicks.
Soccer kicks are banned in most of major MMA promotion due to the debilitating nature of the strike. Early on ONE FC had to attract the viewers so they were using a riskier variation of the ruleset allowing for soccer kicks among other techniques. Rizin still allows soccer kicks.
Silverio wasn’t Aldo’s only victory via soccer kick. He also defeated Artiano Silver Barbosa at Rio MMA Challenge 1 using these spectacular kicks.
Aldo is 35 years old with a professional record consisting of 31 wins and 8 losses. Prior to loss to Dvalishvili he was on a 3 win streak with victories over Marlon Vera, Rob Font and Pedro Munhoz.