Eddie Alvarez says whoever wants him the most will get him

Former Bellator lightweight champion Eddie Alvarez won the biggest fight of his career on Friday night with a first round  headkick KO over Patricky Pitbull at the Bellator 76 event.

It was the final fight on Alvarez’s current contract with Bellator who is now free to entertain offers from other promotions. The UFC has already shown interest in signing Alvarez with UFC President Dana White tweeting Alvarez “Congratulations, let’s talk” just moments after Alvarez had his hand raised on Friday night.

Most people believe that Friday night would be the last time Alvarez would grace the Bellator cage. However, Alvarez knows he is in a position to get paid and wants to fight the best lightweights in the world and communicated that during a post-fight interview with Sherdog.com:

Hopefully, the powers that be…Dana White, Bjorn Rebney, and whatever other promotions are out there. Whoever wants it the most is going to end up getting it, so it’s up to them…not really me.

I wanna fight the best in the world. I want to fight fights that the fans, if the majority of the fans we want you to fight this guy that’s who I want to fight. They’re the fights I want to be involved in, if they are here[Bellator] they are here, if they are in the UFC they are in the UFC. That fact is I been doing this for ten years, I’m not new to this, and I don’t wanna waste my time fighting guys where fights are meaningless and fans don’t want to see them. I just wanna fight big names, big guys, and be involved in big fights that people wanna see.

Alvarez is pointing to the fact that he has not fought the best lightweights in the world during his Bellator stint except for Shinya Aoki. Strikeforce lightweight champion Gilbert Melendez and Bellator lightweight champion Michael Chandler are the only two lightweights that ProMMAnow has ranked that are not in the UFC. However, Alvarez was the first big signing for Bellator and he has shown loyalty to them in the past. Also, Bellator will be moving their programming over to SPIKE TV in just a couple of months, which used to be the home of UFC programming. Bellator lost former middleweight champion Hector Lombard to the UFC earlier this year, and it’ll be interesting to see how all this unfolds.

Alvarez has long been thought to be one of the best lightweights in MMA with a record of (24-3) with 16 wins via TKO/KO and five wins via submission. Alvarez was able to avenge one of those losses against Shinya Aoki in his outing prior to Friday night. However, Michael Chandler (10-0) who defeated Alvarez in November 2011 in a fight that was in contention for “Fight of the Year” is still the current Bellator lightweight champion. Alvarez stated that he would like to have the opportunity to avenge the loss to Chandler, but if did not re-sign with Bellator he would have to deal with that himself.

So where do you think Alvarez will go? Do you think he signs with the UFC, or re-signs with Bellator?