Organized by the Abu Dhabi Combat Club (ADCC), the ADCC Submission Fighting World Championship is the most prestigious Brazilian jiu jitsu tournament in the world, considered by many to be the “Olympics of submission fighting.” Yet fighters aren’t paid to compete, and the prize money hasn’t increased in decades despite the sport’s boom in popularity. Now, famed jiu jitsu competitor and social media troll Craig Jones is putting on a rival tournament on the same day, in the same city — with a grand prize of $1 million — and paying every athlete one dollar more than the grand prize money at ADCC as a way to protest fighter pay.
The ADCC is largely considered to be the Olympic Games of grappling. Every two years, the best athletes from a variety of different martial arts including Judo, freestyle wrestling, Russian Sambo, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu compete for the title of best in the world. ADCC began in 1998 as the creation of Sheik Tahnoun Bin Zayed — the current national security adviser of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (incidentally, his father is Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, founder and first president of the UAE). Tahnoun was introduced to jiu jitsu during his time at college in the United States, and together with his instructor Nelson Monteiro, conceived of a tournament that would feature the best submission fighters from all over the world, competing against one another in an effort to help further grow and formalize the sport.
To date, ADCC has been a huge success in the world of grappling, going from putting on niche underground events confined to a basketball court, to now attracting well over ten thousand fans to college stadiums. But while the sport of grappling grows exponentially, only modest strides have been made in terms of athlete welfare. For example, at the time of the first ever ADCC, every athlete competed for free, with the eventual winner being rewarded with $10,000. Almost three decades later, the prize money hasn’t increased, or even kept up with inflation.
Unsurprisingly, most professional grapplers are unable to make a living off of competing alone. Most depend on adjacent streams of income including sponsorship deals, running a gym, coaching, instructional sales, and seminar tours. It’s almost as if their competitive careers exist as proof-of-concept — essentially amounting to grueling unpaid internships that have the chance to propel them to their actual professions as teachers, coaches, gym owners, and content creators.
Instead, promoters like ADCC have prioritized the production value of their events, opting to allocate the recent increase in revenue from ticket sales and streaming deals toward a goosed-up spectator experience, complete with bigger and better event spaces, on-air talent, and even bongo drummers — all of whom are presumably better compensated than upward of 90 percent of the actual competitors.
Due in part to this massive scaling up of production costs, ADCC has yet to turn a profit — a common refrain the event’s head organizer Mo Jassim deploys when the topic of fighter pay is brought up. Joe Rogan — an avid jiu jitsu practitioner himself and color commentator for Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) — echoed this same sentiment in a recent episode of his podcast. Rogan framed the lack of profits from the event as almost an irrefutable law of nature, instead of the expected cumulative result of the production decisions from ADCC brass. (Rogan has made similar points in the past when questioned about fighter pay in UFC.)
It was especially strange, given Rogan’s massive success in the famously low overhead industry of podcasting. How would Rogan feel if all of a sudden he decided to replace his podcast producer Jamie Vernon with Tom Cruise? Or if on a whim he felt he should host the show not on his property in Austin, but at the fifty-yard line of AT&T Stadium in Dallas? I imagine either development would require Rogan and Spotify to sit down to take a long hard look at their budget.
And while promotional malpractice affects many industries, grapplers as well as combat sports athletes are hit extra hard due to their razor-thin margins and the lack of labor best practices across the industry. It’s unlikely that ADCC, or any comparable organization, ever reaches the heights of the National Football League, National Basketball Association (NBA), or Major League Baseball. These monster institutions of traditional American entertainment have a financial buffer zone not shared by the relatively nascent sports whose core audience relies on participatory-dependent fandom.
It’s unlikely that a day in the life of most professional grapplers will look the same as one of most NBA players anytime soon, but aiming for more athletes in combat sports that could simply make a living from their professional fighting careers without needing to supplement by delivering food or driving for Uber in their downtime — in addition to the ancillary teaching, coaching, and posting — should be more than attainable. In UFC, for example, the most popular combat sports organization on the planet, 39 percent of the company’s fighters fall below the average US income of forty-five thousand a year. Not to mention the average UFC fighter’s career only lasts around three years, with no health insurance or pension to speak of — and many times resulting in lifelong health conditions related to their chosen profession.
Though labor efforts have been largely unsuccessful across combat sports, particularly when compared to their team sport counterparts, there have been some blips of optimism. Last year, boxing pound-for-pound great Terence Crawford spoke about his interest in unionization, claiming that while he and other fighters atop the sport are able to make outlandish amounts of money, the vast majority of professional boxers get compensated very little, especially when considering the physical risks they take just by stepping the ring.
In mixed martial arts (MMA), a group of former UFC fighters filed a class action antitrust lawsuit against the parent company of UFC, alleging that the company took advantage of its monopsony status in the sport by way of unreasonable contracts and lopsided revenue splits. Disappointingly, the case was ultimately settled by the fighters earlier this year. The latest development is in grappling, however, where just last month it was announced that ADCC would face competition from another event — scheduled on the same day, just a couple miles down the road from ADCC, with the express interest in highlighting the issue of athlete pay — the Craig Jones Invitational (CJI).
Jones rose to fame as a two-time ADCC silver medalist himself who also just so happened to be the funniest athlete in combat sports. In addition to Jones’s impressive all-world grappling credentials, his true calling seems to be as the sport’s preeminent provocateur and social media troll. In a sport packed with an absolutely cringe combination of traditionalism, mysticism, self-seriousness, and machismo, Jones stands out through his laid-back training affect, his “Keep Jiu Jitsu Gay” apparel, as well as outspoken criticism of the sport’s top competitors and their fixation with alpha male aesthetics.
Jones is a unique and unexpected labor figure in combat sports. For years, the thirty-two-year-old Aussie has been complaining about the state of grappler pay, in between victorious super fight matches and occasional references to Cum Town, an edgy New York podcast. So when it was announced that he’d managed to secure funding for his own nonprofit grappling tournament, many were unsure just how serious this was.
Jones announced every competitor would receive $10,001 in show money ($1 more than the men’s weight class champions receive in ADCC), and an unprecedented $1 million to the eventual champions — the largest purse in grappling history. Many in the sport have criticized Jones’s brazen effort to seemingly upend ADCC, claiming that while they support an increase in fighter pay, Jones is being too combative toward the promotion. In a rare moment of earnestness on the MMA Hour With Ariel Helwani, Jones had this to say in response to those who feel as though his actions are needlessly confrontational, and will only divide the grappling community:
You kind of have to make the athletes and fans make a choice. . . . I took a big gamble, that we could put enough money on the line that [the athletes] would choose to basically unionize . . . and come together as athletes . . . if all the existing champions really come together, we can really make a statement about grappler pay in the sport.
Encouragingly, many more in the sport have praised Jones’s efforts and felt encouraged to speak out themselves. Big names including former world champions Ffion Davies, Victor Hugo, Tye and Kade Ruotolo, and Mackenzie Dern represent just a handful of the current and former world champions who have spurned their ADCC invite to compete in CJI this year.
It’s clear ADCC is beginning to feel the pressure. From reports of face-saving attempts of paying athletes under the table to secure their fealty, to quietly increasing the previously unequal prize money for female competitors, to certain organizers making early morning death threats on social media, the writing is on the wall as to what’s to come for competitive grappling.
Thanks to Jones and the experiences of his predecessors, the myth of your life changing due to a gold medal is starting to fade. More and more competitors and fans of the sport recognize the increasingly anachronist arguments around competitive prestige, honor, and loyalty for what they are — red herrings to keep the money out of the pockets of the people doing the real work. Fighters put their bodies, brains, and even their lives on the line to compete in part for our entertainment. And we show up, not for a promotion or a paper pusher or bongo drummer — but for them. They deserve their fair share.
