Marina Spasic's UFC debut: “It will be crazy”
The Belgrade strawweight steps into the UFC cage for the first time on Saturday, in front of a home crowd. She lost her last fight in Slovenia and rebuilt her entire team before the call came.
In a Belgrade hotel lobby, two days out from the card, Marina Spasic was in no hurry at all. She checked in early on purpose, she says, so she would not miss a single minute of a week she has been chasing since she first walked into a kickboxing gym in 2016.
“I’m feeling great. I’ve been waiting to come here in the hotel because I want to enjoy every second,” she said in an interview with the official UFC website, published on Thursday, two days before the fight.
She is 32, born in Belgrade, and she fights at strawweight. On Saturday, August 1, she meets Brazil’s Stephanie Luciano at Belgrade Arena, on the prelims of UFC Fight Night: Medic vs Rodriguez. The UFC billed her walk as the first time a Serbian fighter heads to the cage at one of its events.
“I am so proud to be here, so happy. I’ve been waiting for this, so many years, and finally I’m here,” she said.
Ten days’ notice and a loss in Slovenia
The road here was not a straight line. Her last fight before the UFC called came in November 2025 in Slovenia, and she lost it on the judges’ scorecards. She took the bout on ten days’ notice and walked in carrying an injury picked up in sparring. She did not dance around any of that, she built her case on it.
“Sometimes you have to throw something away to be better and to learn. When you lose, you must work on yourself and to be better every day,” Spasic said.
The rebuild followed quickly. Since February 2026 she has been working with a new coach, after reshuffling the whole team around her. For a fighter who only turned professional in MMA in 2021, five months is not long for new work to settle, and the timing means her first outing under new instruction lands on the biggest stage the sport has.
Who is Stephanie Luciano?
The Brazilian carries a 7-2-1 record and a 2-1 mark inside the UFC. Saturday is her fourth fight in the promotion and her shot at a second straight win, and three of her seven career victories ended inside the distance.
Spasic sits at 7-1, with six knockouts and 86 percent of her wins settled before the final bell. Put those two numbers side by side and a long, patient fight along the fence is hard to picture. She reads it the same way.
“I think it will be a good fight for watching because we are attractive strikers,” she said.
What a full arena means to her
Her fight sits on the prelims, in the hours when the building is still filling up. Spasic sees it differently, and asked about the atmosphere waiting at Belgrade Arena, she gave the line that defined the whole build-up.
“It will be crazy. I can imagine the situation when I win, and all the arena is screaming my name,” Spasic said.
Nina Milosevic and Borislav Nikolic are on the same prelim card, along with Jovan Leka. We covered the full lineup earlier in our piece on Rakic and the five debutants, nine of our names on a single card, and Spasic is the only one in that column whose career started in kickboxing rather than in wrestling or judo.
The first fights at Belgrade Arena start on Saturday, August 1. If the bout opens the way both women are advertising it, the first minute will probably say more than the entire week of promotion. The numbers say Spasic rarely leaves work for the judges, and the last time she did, in Slovenia, she did not like the answer she got.
