An Exciting Time For Submission Grappling Fans and Athletes
ADCC 2024 will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada on August 17th and 18th. To gain access to compete to this prestigious event, you have to either be invited or win a ticket. If you aren’t sure you’ll be invited, you won’t be. To win a ticket, one must earn gold in one of the regional events that the ADCC organization hosts.
Notable Winners
Abu Dhabi Combat Club has been a mainstay in no-gi jiu jitsu competition for the last twenty six years. The United Arab Emirates held the first tournament in 1998. Founded by the Sheik Tahnoun Bin Zayed Al Nahyan and his BJJ instructor Nelson Monteiro, the first tournament featured winners such as Mario Sperry, Renzo Gracie, and Rodrigo Gracie.
Image – Forbes
While most of the competitors are high level jiu jitsu black belts, the ruleset allows for other kinds of grapplers to be successful. Mark Kerr took home ADCC gold in 2000, Nicky Rodriguez won silver in 2019 as a blue belt in jiu jitsu, and won silver in 2022 as a brown belt.
Image – Flo Grappling
Craig Jones’s Take on the New ADCC
ADCC was known as one of the only tournaments that could pay a purse to the winner of every category. The possibility of the $10,000 prize at the top, plus the fame of the title, could change the life of an aspiring combat athlete, even if only temporarily. One ADCC veteran and perpetual silver medalist has weighed in on this topic.
Craig Jones is on the fence for his ADCC 2024 invitation. He makes the case that given the amount of prize money offered, even if he won first place (something that might actually hurt his brand) he would still lose money. The time it would take to train would distract from his other, more lucrative, ventures. He also points out that as tickets sales and publicity for the event has only ever grown, the money paid to athletes has remained static. While it still one of the more generous prizes in jiu jitsu, $10,000 in 1998 money is different than 2024.
Other Prizes, Other Places
I would like to point out that in many other prestigious jiu jitsu tournaments the prize is a gold medal and a bouquet of flowers. It’s a nice bouquet, but it’s not $10,000 nice. Most of the top athletes in submission grappling and jiu jitsu make their money on seminars and tutorials. Alas, there have started to be more substantial prizes in tournaments and super fights. The top prize possible for an EBI event is $50,000. Polaris’s grappling tournament offers $30,000 for their purse. It is worth noting that none of these events have sold out the T-Mobile arena in Las Vegas. The T-Mobile Arena takes $2,000,000 to book and is the 2024 venue for ADCC.
The Ever Present Question of Fair Compensation
What are combat athletes owed for their performance and what can be afforded by the organization? On a larger scale, the UFC comes under criticism for paying its athletes a small percentage of their profits. Other MMA organizations struggle to turn a profit because of the amount of money they offer to their athletes. This goes into basic economics; the more money spent on labor, the less money there is to invest into promotion. The free market is good, but when it is applied to a sport that lessens the quality of life of its athletes what is the adequate way to determine compensation? The answer is, I don’t know.
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