Mo Jassim is the head organizer for ADCC 2024 and he’s been operating in this role since 2019, but this is the first year that he’s had to face direct competition from the Craig Jones Invitational. The event was created by Craig Jones in order to increase pay for athletes in the sport and he’s set about having an immediate impact by announcing that the event will offer a million dollars in prize money for every winner. Not content with simply offering the biggest prize in the history of professional grappling, Jones also revealed shortly after that the event was going to take place over the same weekend and in the same city as ADCC.
This meant that athletes had choose between the two events and a large number of them withdrew from ADCC to compete at the Craig Jones Invitational instead. Obviously this will make things more difficult for the people behind the scenes who work all year long in order to make sure an event like ADCC comes to fruition. Every competitor who leaves for the Craig Jones Invitational after accepting an invite to ADCC is another space that needs to be filled by inviting someone new. Having to do so at a time when the divisions were almost entirely finished must be causing plenty of headaches for Jassim and the rest of his team.
He was recently asked about losing athletes to the Craig Jones Invitational in an interview with AG Fight and to his credit, Mo Jassim was overwhelmingly positive about the situation:
“I mean, we’ll see. At the end of the day, ADCC is voluntary. We don’t do contracts. So if someone wants to leave, that’s okay. My only thing is just let me know so I have time to get a replacement. But you know, I remember in 2019, I believe we had 19 pullouts due to injuries and stuff like that. So it’s nothing new to me. You know, we’re going to be fine. All the tickets have been sold and they’re taking a much different approach. And like we were discussing, my thing is I want to blow this up to pull people from outside the sport. But you know, if Craig’s bringing in big money and getting some athletes paid and it’s good for the sport, why not? But like I said, we’ve always, we’re used to having athletes pull out and you know, we’ll manage. There’s a lot of people who want to be in ADCC, let’s just say that.”
The full interview with ADCC head organizer Mo Jassim where he discusses the Craig Jones Invitational was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of AG Fight:
