Max Headroom 
Aline Pereira’s American dream is to build a fighting career solid enough that her family can have a comfortable life in the United States, and she no longer needs a side job to make ends meet.
The younger sister of UFC light heavyweight champion Alex Pereira is slated to return to the Karate Combat pit Friday in Miami, battling Gisele Luna. Ahead of that contest, she celebrates being around legends of the sport in the gym, such as her brother “Poatan” and ex-UFC champion Glover Teixeira, and dreams of one day being able to “live only for the sport.”
Like her brother, Pereira built a career in kickboxing before attempting a transition to MMA between 2022 and 2023, going 1-2 under the LFA banner. She’s now under contract with Karate Combat, and scored a highlight-reel knockout over Dee Begley in her debut this past October.
Despite the good bump in pay in Karate Combat compared to kickboxing and MMA, Pereira said she still needs to hustle for hours to earn extra money in between fights.
“I do deliveries for Amazon, and we do what we have to do,” Pereira told MMA Fighting. “This routine is very tiresome because we still have to accommodate the training hours and the job, but it all works out in the end.”
When not in camp for a fight, Pereira wakes up at 2:30 a.m. and drives 10 minutes to an Amazon warehouse to pick up boxes to deliver. She explained the decision to wake up that early is to avoid traffic and make sure she’s free to train later in the day.
“It’s not easy,” Pereira said. “We do deliveries for four and a half hours. But it’s great to be here. The United States is very good for me and my son, too.”
Pereira hopes to score another victory Friday to earn bigger opportunities in the combat sports world. She’s still working on her wrestling and jiu-jitsu at Glover Teixeira’s gym for a potential return to MMA down the line, but the focus today is to build a career at Karate Combat.
“I’m really excited, I really loved my debut,” Pereira said. “[Karate Combat] is quite different, isn’t it? I came well-prepared last time, and it won’t be different this time. I’ll put on another show. The promotion is growing, and it’s great to be part of it. They value the athlete a lot. … We train for [a knockout], right? My brother and I are very technical, and we always work for the knockout, but I can’t come here and promise a knockout. Funny that last time I said I would knock her out. I never said it before a fight, but she was talking so much crap.”
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