Glory of Heroes 1: Pereira Defeats Adesanya

On April 2, 2016, Alex Pereira and Israel Adesanya met for the first time as professionals at Glory of Heroes 1 in Shenzhen, China. The 2016 bout was contested under kickboxing rules and went the scheduled distance. Judges scored the fight in favor of Pereira by unanimous decision, giving Pereira the first official professional victory over Adesanya and creating the first recorded point of friction between the two fighters [5][1]. Context: At the time both men were prominent stand-up fighters on parallel kickboxing tracks: Pereira representing Brazilian kickboxing outfits and Adesanya building an international profile out of New Zealand. The event setting in Shenzhen placed the fight on an international card where neither fighter had home advantage; the decision was formalized on the official fight card for Glory of Heroes 1 [5]. The incident itself: The fight lasted the scheduled rounds, and after the final bell the judges returned a unanimous decision for Alex Pereira. Reports and later head-to-head summaries list the outcome as Pereira defeating Adesanya by unanimous decision on April 2, 2016 [5]. There are no widely circulated, verbatim post-fight quotes from either fighter in the primary sources specific to the 2016 decision, but the result has been consistently recorded in fight chronologies and used as the opening fact in later narratives about the pair [1][5]. Immediate reactions: Contemporary coverage treated the result as an important win for Pereira; later retrospectives cite the decision as the first step toward a rivalry that escalated after their 2017 rematch and then resurfaced when both fighters entered the UFC [1][5].

The April 2, 2016 unanimous decision at Glory of Heroes 1 matters because it is the verifiable starting point of the Adesanya–Pereira competitive ledger: Pereira earned an early professional edge that later framed their rematch narratives and motivated future call-ups to higher-profile events [5][1]. The result anchored claims each fighter would later make about superiority and provided Pereira with a documented claim he could cite when pursuing a contest in MMA and ultimately the UFC. As an origin incident, the 2016 decision is used in media timelines to show the rivalry began inside kickboxing rather than in MMA [1][5].

After the 2016 decision, both fighters continued competing in kickboxing. The recorded outcome set up a rematch that took place on March 4, 2017, at Glory of Heroes 7 in São Paulo, where Pereira again prevailed—this time by knockout—which intensified the competitive narrative between the two [3][5]. Over the next years, Pereira transitioned to mixed martial arts and eventually to the UFC; the 2016 fight is treated in later coverage as the first data point in a multi-fight rivalry that culminated in UFC title fights in 2022 and 2023 [1][4].