For as long as most grapplers can remember, ADCC has been the answer to a simple question: who is the best in the world? Every two years, the field assembled in one place and settled it. No promoter feuds, no organizational allegiances — just the best practitioners on earth, competing under the same roof. That era is ending.
What's happening to grappling's competitive landscape right now is not a temporary disruption. It is a structural realignment — one that will permanently split elite talent across separate ecosystems, each with their own broadcast deals, rule sets, prize structures, and contractual walls. ADCC 2026 in Kraków, Poland, scheduled for September 12–13, may be the last edition in which the phrase "best in the world" can be applied to the field without an asterisk.
The First Crack: CJI Splinters the Field
The fracture didn't begin with UFC BJJ. It began in 2024 when Craig Jones — a two-time ADCC silver medalist who had grown frustrated with the event's stagnant prize structure — announced he would not compete at ADCC 2024 and would instead launch his own tournament. ADCC's winner's purse had remained at $10,000 for years despite the sport's growing audience. Jones's response was to find anonymous backing and build the Craig Jones Invitational, a submission-only event paying $1,000,000 to each weight class winner — and $10,001 to every athlete who showed up, as a pointed jab at ADCC's top payout.
Then he scheduled it in Las Vegas on the same weekend as ADCC.
The impact was immediate. Ffion Davies, the reigning ADCC women's champion, chose CJI over ADCC. So did multiple ADCC Trials winners. Kade Ruotolo, one of the most exciting grapplers in the sport, won the CJI inaugural -80kg bracket. Nicky Rodriguez — "Nicky Rod," who had just finished ADCC 2022 as a silver medalist — won the openweight bracket on the other side of the city from the event that had made him a household name. CJI 1 drew over 100,000 concurrent YouTube viewers across both days — for free — and won both Promotion of the Year and Fight Card of the Year at the 2024 Jits Magazine BJJ Awards.[1]
CJI returned in 2025 with a team format, an eight-gym bracket, a $1 million prize pool, and a women's division. The B-Team won. The women's field included four of the most accomplished female grapplers on the planet: Adele Fornarino, Ana Carolina Vieira, Helena Crevar, and Sarah Galvão. The event is already confirmed to return in 2026 as CJI 3, running alongside the UFC BJJ calendar.[2][3]
"ADCC is like our Olympics. There's something deep and special about winning that. Now you're not allowing athletes to do that. For what? For control. This isn't for the athletes."
— Tom DeBlass, ONE Championship VP of Grappling, on UFC BJJ's ADCC ban[4]
The Wall Goes Up: UFC BJJ Enforces Exclusivity
If CJI cracked the foundation, UFC BJJ is changing the floor plan entirely. After years of hosting grappling under the UFC Fight Pass Invitational banner, the organization rebranded in June 2025 as UFC BJJ and began signing exclusive contracts with top competitors — following the same model that built the UFC's monopoly in MMA.[5]
The consequences became official in February 2026, when UFC BJJ executive Claudia Gadelha confirmed in an interview that exclusively contracted athletes would be permitted to compete at ADCC 2026 as a one-time exception — but that after this year, UFC BJJ athletes will compete only under the UFC BJJ banner. Her exact words: "There are some of our exclusive athletes that we've given the ADCC to this year, but from next year on, they can only be an athlete of the UFC BJJ."[6]
That makes ADCC 2026 a transitional event — the last one in which the current generation of UFC-contracted grapplers can legally step onto the mats. After Kraków, the wall is up.
Notable Athletes Now in the UFC BJJ Ecosystem — With ADCC History
The UFC BJJ roster is expanding rapidly. The promotion ran six events in its debut year and has announced ten for 2026. The prize money on offer across that many events dwarfs what ADCC pays its champions in a two-year cycle — a point Mikey Musumeci made publicly when defending the exclusivity policy, noting that UFC BJJ runs 20 events across two years against ADCC's one. The financial argument is real. The cost to the sport's competitive integrity is also real.[7]
A Third Orbit: The Professional Grappling Federation
Meanwhile, a third competitive ecosystem has been quietly professionalizing on its own terms. The Professional Grappling Federation, founded by Brandon McCaghren, launched its first full league season in 2025 — moving away from a tournament model toward a structure closer to the NFL or NBA, complete with franchise teams, a draft, a regular season, playoffs, and independently owned team franchises. One franchise was sold in a seven-figure deal in 2025, signaling that the sport is starting to attract investment capital that does not depend on ADCC's credibility to exist.[8][9]
PGF is not positioned as a prestige event in the ADCC mold. It is positioned as a career — a place for athletes to compete weekly, build fan relationships, earn consistent income, and develop inside a team structure. That is a fundamentally different value proposition than a biennial world championship, and for many athletes, potentially a more sustainable one.
The Four Ecosystems at a Glance
What Athletes Are Actually Choosing Between
A top grappling prospect emerging today faces a decision that did not exist five years ago. The question used to be simple: earn your way to ADCC and prove yourself there. Now the question is which ecosystem to build a career inside — and the choice carries serious trade-offs.
Signing exclusively with UFC BJJ means consistent competition, meaningful income, and the infrastructure of the world's largest combat sports organization behind you. It also means walking away from ADCC permanently after 2026, and potentially from CJI and other open events as well. The prestige ceiling is different. The financial floor is higher.
Staying independent means ADCC remains accessible, CJI invites are possible, and PGF participation is open. But "independent" in a landscape of exclusive ecosystems increasingly means being left out of the biggest platforms, biggest paydays, and most stable career structures.
Tom DeBlass, ONE Championship's VP of Grappling and an outspoken critic of the UFC BJJ exclusivity policy, has publicly promised athletes a different path: "You want to compete in IBJJF, ADCC, WNO, Polaris — talk to me. This is your life, and you only get one." Whether that promise holds organizational weight as UFC BJJ continues to consolidate talent remains an open question.
What Kraków Represents
ADCC 2026 in Kraków will almost certainly produce legitimate world champions. The Trials process is legitimate, the reigning champions are being re-invited, and top competitors from outside the UFC BJJ roster remain available. Gordon Ryan, arguably the greatest no-gi grappler in the sport's history at seven-time ADCC World Champion, competes outside the UFC BJJ structure. Kaynan Duarte, the 2024 ADCC absolute champion, is not exclusively signed. The field will be strong.[10]
But it will no longer be complete. And from 2028 onward — assuming UFC BJJ continues to grow and enforce its policies — the event that built the very legitimacy these athletes are trading on will be operating with an increasingly narrow talent pool, separated by contract walls from the athletes it helped make famous.
The sport is not dying. If anything, grappling has never had more money, more events, or more professional infrastructure than it does right now. But the unified stage — the one place where everyone competed under the same conditions — is being subdivided. What we're watching happen to submission grappling in 2026 is what happened to boxing decades ago: the proliferation of organizations, the dilution of titles, and the slow erosion of the events that once answered the question definitively.
Watch Kraków. Watch it like it might be the last time the best in the world are all in the same bracket. Because depending on how the next two years unfold, it very well could be.
Sources
- Gold BJJ — "Craig Jones Invitational 2025 (CJI 2): Competitors, Rules & More." goldbjj.com
- BJJEE — "Craig Jones Announces Former UFC Champ's Participation in CJI." bjjee.com
- Wikipedia — "Craig Jones Invitational." en.wikipedia.org
- Jits Magazine — "Tom DeBlass Slams UFC BJJ Exclusive Contracts: 'Grappling Is Not MMA.'" jitsmagazine.com
- MMA Mania — "UFC BJJ Launched: Everything We Know." mmamania.com
- Jits Magazine — "Claudia Gadelha Confirms UFC BJJ Athletes Will Not Compete At ADCC After 2026." jitsmagazine.com
- MMA Mania — "UFC BJJ to ban athletes from ADCC, Mikey Musumeci backs decision." mmamania.com
- BJJEE — "The Professional Grappling Federation Enters Full League Era with Season 8." bjjee.com
- BJJEE — "PGF Becomes the First-Ever Professional Jiu-Jitsu League to Sell a Franchise Team." bjjee.com
- MMA Mania — "ADCC 2026 fight card: List of confirmed BJJ stars invited to the ADCC World Championships." mmamania.com