3 pages and nobody stated the obvious
He was a can crasher, over 50 percent the people he fought don't even have wiki pages
To his credit, he
wanted really badly to fight the best guys in his division during the years he racked up his pre-WEC 32-1 record-- Ryota Matsune, Akitoshi Hokazono, Kentaro Imaizumi, Masahiro Oishi, Daniel Lima, Marcos Galvao, Shuichiro Katsumura. Very, very good fighters, a lot of 'em would have great chances of being elite today even. The money just wasn't there compared to what he was getting in America.
There's an interesting story about how his first fights he did in secret, winning some one-night tournaments in nightclubs in the 90s, and he did it just because he loved to fight. He didn't care about money. Then when he told his family about it, his father beat him and told him he can't make bad business decisions if his brain's gonna be on the line. And Shooto was known to only pay their champions something like 1k/1k [Shooto was always more concerned with the
pure sporting aspect of MMA, which's why they have the
best fighter-development infrastructure in the world], and it's not like non-Japanese had an easy time of getting sponsors together in Shooto to offset that.
Also, Miguel's Iron Heart Crown victories are all solid wins, as are his one-night tournament matches, especially given how much size he gave up in a lot of 'em (Charles Wilson had like four inches and 20 pounds on Miguel going into their fight, and given Miguel's lack of an offensive wrasslin' game and Wilson's kickboxing background, was a real tough stylistic matchup). Outside of those, his opponent quality is pretty hit-or-miss; a couple of 'em are pretty good, some of 'em are alright wins and others were overmatched, but he made good money and was
waiting for an opportunity to present itself to fight the best, so you can't blame him. If Helio (a Japanese nutrition company, they were Kyoji Horiguchi and Takeya Mizugaki's primary sponsor back when the UFC provided sponsors) had decided to give Miguel a good sponsorship deal to compete in Japanese Shooto, he would've fought in there for a long time and, had he won, his record would've been much more impressive.
Miguel's business acumen is also the only reason he has a pair of successful gyms, too, which is a lot more than most fighters of that era can say, so you can't say his choices didn't pay off.