This article from Andrew Wiltse about CJI vs ADCC is part of our Craig Jones Invitational 2024 coverage. To get live results, play by play, and commentary, we’ll have a live updates article running all weekend.
After receiving dozens of messages on social media asking for my opinion on the CJI (Craig Jones Invitational) vs the ADCC debate, I figured I’d quickly type out a small, very brief… 3,293 word monstrosity. Forgive me, for I have sinned. Also forgive me for my dusty writing skills.
**TLDR: CJI is objectively good for the sport, even if its on the same day as the ADCC.**
Put the pitchforks down, i’m going to explain my case. First, I’m going to preface this by saying I have a lot of respect for ADCC and I personally like Mo Jassim. He’s always been incredibly kind to me. I hope that ADCC can make some adjustments in the future and continue to be the powerhouse that it’s always been.
ADCC has been around for a very long time now. It is considered to be a staple of the jiujitsu community. The absolute pinnacle of No Gi Grappling. The tournament where legends are born and cemented. Elite as hell, you might say. Just to compete, you have to either win one of a select number of incredibly gruelling ADCC Trials, a feat that is colloquially referred to as difficult as f*ck, or be so widely recognized as talented that you receive an invitation just for being you. The reigning king of No Gi Championships, ADCC has had very little credible competition in the past for a variety of reasons.
Backed by billionaires, ADCC has managed to rise above all others by putting on a well-organized, exciting show while also paying athletes more than they could feasibly make at other events. Very few organizations have had the capability of paying out the kinds of funds that the ADCC has historically paid out. Primarily because BJJ has been a small sport, both participant and viewership wise, when compared to any other mainstream sport. There just hasn’t been a lot of money in it to go around.
Historically, but times change. Things have been on the uptick for the last half a decade. Every measurable facet of BJJ—from the number of participants, to the availability of online media, to organizations to train under or compete at—has massively expanded. There is now significantly more money floating around the BJJ scene than there was a decade ago. People can feasibly make a living exclusively competing and teaching BJJ in a way that wasn’t reliable in the past.
You’d think that with the raise in all other factors, athlete pay might also have seen an increase. It just makes sense, right? But ADCC has not significantly raised its cash payout in quite a while. Winners at ADCC can expect to be paid out roughly $10,000, without factoring in potential bonuses that can be paid out for particularly impressive feats. Wow! Ten grand for a day or two’s work. Sounds great, right? While this may seem like a lot of money to someone who’s never had any, there are a few things in the adult world that would like to have a word on the subject. Like taxes and bills. Every adult’s favorite pairing of things. Ten grand can certainly get you ahead in life, but how long does ten grand really last in today’s economy?
Does ADCC just not have the money to raise its prize pool? Something ADCC does very well every year is putting on a spectacle. The venue is exceptional. The aesthetics are on point. The recordings and live streams are crisp and clear. Fans that purchase tickets very rarely have reason to regret doing so. And the production value seemingly increases every year. While some of this can be attributed to the accumulation of skills by the organizers and staff, certainly there has been an increase in spending on the event itself. So… there is money to be spent. Just not on the athletes.
Let’s take a small detour to briefly glance at what it takes to become one of the best BJJ practitioners in the world. Before having even a remote chance of winning an event like ADCC, athletes are required to spend years training like it’s a full time job. For them, it is. Between sparring, drilling, stretching, strength training, cardio, film study, diet prep, and various other things that go into making someone a top tier athlete in BJJ, a prospecting athlete can consider themselves to have a full plate. Mentally and physically, the energy and time of an an elite athlete have a finite amount to go around. When are they expected to work a full or part time job? This leaves many aspiring athletes subsisting on the bare minimum.
This can impact their physical and mental health, something i’ve been assured can have a detrimental effect on your budding BJJ skills. Unless, that is, they are fortunate enough to have financial backers or some kind of teaching position at a gym thats affluent enough to pay for such a position. Private lessons and seminars tend to be reserved for people who have already managed to accumulate a significant amount of skill and recognition. You might call this a catch twenty two. So some athletes are already at a disadvantage compared to others simply due to their finances. If your opponents are training for hours every day, you have to do the same or fall behind. And you have to do it for years and years.
Let’s explore this from another angle. The average amount of time it takes to receive a black belt in Jiujitsu is very similar to the amount of time it takes to earn a PHD. Actually, there are likely holders of a PHD that have put less time and effort into their craft than current or past winners at ADCC have put into theirs. Let that settle for a second. You, as a fan of the sport, want people like ADCC winners to exist. You want them to be as good as possible, both for entertainment value and way they push the sport forward technically. This doesn’t just happen. An enormous amount of time and sacrifice is required to compete in today’s BJJ scene. This comes at an opportunity cost. For dedicating your life to jiujitsu instead of pursuing other avenues of making money, you can expect to be rewarded with… very little. Huh. That doesn’t seem to add up, does it? Do these athletes not deserve to have their time and energy rewarded?
Vocal supporters of ADCC try to excuse the low pay by claiming that the prestige garnered from the event will pay off in the long term. Someone who has a solid run at ADCC can reasonably expect to see an uptick in instructional sales, seminar invitations, private lessons, gym membership, ect. Why pay the athletes more money for your event when they’ll have all other avenues of monetizing their BJJ increased as a result?
Its actually remarkably similar to how tipping culture works in the united states. The expectation is that other people down the line will foot the bill instead of the employer, with the employer in this case being ADCC and you being the customer expected to tip the starving athlete. Every professional deserves to make a living wage, right?
Unfortunately, not all athletes are created equal. Some people, based on skills that are not necessarily related to BJJ itself, will be more successful than others. Teaching is a skill unto its own. Not everyone who is a phenomenal competitor can or will make a good instructor. Mentally organizing your skillset and deciding how best to display that information to an audience and in what order is a skill many top-tier athletes simply lack. An athlete may find themselves instructing well in a live environment where feedback from the crowd is feasible, but faltering at the prospect of creating a multi-hour instructional.
Some athletes find themselves tragically devoid of very crucial things like basic social skills. Raw charisma plays a large role in persuading gym owners to invite an athlete to teach a seminar. Many athletes make easily avoidable mistakes by either under-indulging or thought vomiting on social media – alienating fans through a lack of presence or sheer dumb*ssness. Believe it or not, some of them are downright socially stunted (not pointing any obvious fingers or anything).
This doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to make an income from their insane abilities. They are capable of providing immense amounts of entertainment value to fans of the sport through their perfection and mastery of Jiujitsu. Organizers, recognizing this, are making money selling this entertainment value to fans and advertisers. The question is should the athlete be provided with a healthy portion of this so that they can survive and continue to train and entertain? Some people think so.
So should ADCC have been paying more this entire time? The common counter argument I see is that in order to attract more people to the sport, there needs to be a heavy priority on the spectacle of the event, even if it means paying the athletes less. Therefore, the increase in funds that ADCC has received would best be spent on boosting the production value of the event itself. This is an argument that definitely holds some merit. People need to want to watch your athletic event in order to sell sponsorships, tickets, paraphernalia, and other simple monetization tactics. Without these things, there wont even be money to pay the athletes. There are an infinite number of ways to increase the production value of your event, and many of them genuinely make a difference.
However, Jiujitsu is a small, niche, weird sport… full of small, neurodivergent, weird people. Many of these people train in locations or conditions that others might consider… less than ideal. A laundromat, for example. Jiujitsu athletes are somewhat known for lacking f*cks to give. There is absolutely a bare minimum event and stream quality necessary to achieve in order to avoid the wrath of pyjama stranglers, but beyond that, I don’t see jiujitsu athletes caring all that much. I would argue that the average jiujitsu fan feels enough of a parasocial connection with their favorite athlete to want that athlete to receive a pay that allows them to continue training and pushing the technique of the sport forward more than they care about the spectacle of an event.
I would also argue that someone who you might classify as a Super Athlete, when deciding whether or not to pursue jiujitsu full time, has to carefully weigh the currently abysmal payment of jiujitsu events when deciding what sport to pursue. Many of them will pursue other avenues. Less superstar athletes that fans can enjoy watching or learning from is bad for the viewership of the sport over the long term. Superstars like Michael Jordan push a sport forward… but Michael Jordans want to be paid like Michael Jordans.
Seriously, put yourself in the position of someone who has the choice of either going to college, playing professional basketball, or pursuing jiujitsu full time. You’d have to be a braindead Daisy Fre-… I mean, have an abundance of passion for the sport to drop out of college and move into a gym for a decade, just on the off chance that you’re one day better than hundreds of other people doing the same thing. All for the chance of maybe, possibly, against all odds, winning some low paying events that clearly do not put the good of the athlete at their front. I’ve heard worse sales pitches, but not many.
So the pay needs to be raised for the longevity and health of the sport, but the pay has not been raised. People have certainly been calling for it to happen for a while, but its simply not becoming a reality despite the outcry. So how do you make an event like ADCC, which to my knowledge is very largely controlled by a single individual, change their mind on a subject they’ve previously shown no inclination to change their minds on?
This is why I support the CJI placing their event date on the same day as ADCC. ADCC has now been forced into a position where they must either make massive changes or get left behind. And it had to be this way. Other options weren’t working. Imagine, for a moment, that you wanted to pressure ADCC into making some serious changes. As a famous, charismatic athlete you try being outspoken about the subject. You fail. You need something to really influence ADCC in a way they can’t ignore or brush aside. F*ck it, we ball.
Let’s host our own event, with blackjack and hookers. Now I just need to seriously compete with ADCC. How? No well known athletes will want to compete at my event without other well known athletes already competing in it. So, I simply need to persuade the best of the best to betray the organization that likely had a large say in their rise to fame. Just the minor task of convincing the best athletes to compete at my event instead of… the f*cking ADCC world championship.
Sh*t. Not an easy task… So how do you lure away these super talented and famous athletes from what is historically the most prestigious event in jiujitsu? There is no prestige until you have the athletes, and without the athletes you’ll have no prestige to lure more athletes. So what can you offer these athletes that the ADCC can’t or won’t thats so overwhelmingly enticing that they’ll switch allegiance?
F*ckloads of money. Of course its f*ckloads of money. Money solves everything in large enough quantities. How much money is enough, though? I reckon something like a million dollars might do it. However, there can only be one winner in a tournament, and sacrificing your spot at ADCC, now and potentially in the future, (something I’m going to talk about) might not make sense on paper even if there is a million dollars on the line. Thats why you guarantee payment for athletes attending the event even if they lose. Nice. Guaranteed money is always good. Maybe you also tweak some of the things people don’t like about ADCC, like not having to weigh in multiple times during the event. Maybe you get really buck wild and steroid test. Sigh…
Great job, now you’ve got a few big names on board. Those names bring in more names. Prestige, in jiujitsu, comes solely from who you beat. In our sport, individual skill is measured by comparing it to the skill of others. If the bracket is stacked to the gills and you win the bracket, you’re the man and deserve all the praise you get. Now that I have some big names at my event, and a historically high payout, more fans will be willing to watch my event. All of the attention brings in more sponsorships for the event, allowing you to do more for the athletes and the event… Snowball, b*tches.
Facing the loss of what makes ADCC special in the first place (the best of the best competing in it), ADCC is now forced to respond in some way. They could bite the bullet and change the date of the event, but that would cost them quite a lot of face, pride, and literal money (the venue costs money. The staff costs money. Sponsorship deals for particular dates can be complicated. There’s a large variety of reasons that this is difficult to do). Or they can hit the panic button and do whatever they can to keep athletes interested in their event (except raise the pay of course. That would be crazy).
One way they can do that is by publicly leaning on the loyalty of the athletes who have previously benefited from the organizer of the event or the event itself. Jiujitsu as a whole really loves leaning on the whole loyalty thing, even if it is commonly a one way street. This will surely sway some people to stay at your event, and you can see from public media posts that it certainly has. However, faced with what is likely going to be this particular year’s most prestigious event (and the small, almost insignificant amount of a million dollars) many athletes are still going to jump ship. We now have a weird situation where the best of the best the sport has to offer are no longer competing in the same tournament. Fans of the sport are now faced with the annoying decision of which event to watch when both events are going to showcase top athletes at their prime, executing state of the art techniques.
Keep in mind that there is also no guarantee that CJI will manage to pull off a similar feat next year, while ADCC will almost certainly still be around. That sounds bad. How can forcing fans to think and make decisions possibly be good for the sport?
Let me ask you a question. Have any of you been on social media lately? If you have, you’ve likely seen the vast amount of discussion going around about athletes pay and what athletes deserve. The juicy drama of who’s jumping ship and who’s staying. Betrayal of old loyalties. The fanbases of individual athletes splitting along what seem like BJJ party lines. It’s hectic. Its crazy. Its lovely, delicious insanity. Its the perfect storm for us gossipy b*tches out there. We love our BJJ drama.
And this is why I think that CJI taking on ADCC is currently good for the sport. The public now gives a massive f*ck about athletes pay and tournament standards. Not only is the CJI offering tangible benefits to the athletes competing in it this year in terms of money and exposure, making it a wise short term investment, but the controversy also forces the discussion to the forefront of everyones’ minds. Athletes deserve more pay. Now they are more likely to get it in the future.
ADCC has already shown that it can be supplanted if it doesn’t adapt. We’ve witnessed God bleed, and there will surely be sharks in the water (Are you really a BJJ athlete if you don’t mix in a shark metaphor whenever possible?). So the ADCC will HAVE to raise its pay or risk another event coming along and challenging them again. Not only that, but every BJJ event going forward is going to have their pay scrutinized for as long as this remains in the public discussion, and organizers are going to factor that in to their decision making.
But what if the athletes competing in CJI aren’t invited to future ADCC events? What if, in some wacky-zany world, the organizers at the ADCC happen to be human and hold a grudge? Well, in that case ADCC will have displayed that they were never a serious competitive organization to begin with and there will be even more controversy and backlash. Personal loyalty and all of that bullsh*t should have no place whatsoever in the organizing of the “most prestigious” event in all of BJJ. Organization and invitation should be based on merit alone. Period.
Will ADCC 2024 suffer as a result of CJI? Almost definitely. For the athletes that decide to stick with the ADCC, they’ll be facing easier brackets and that means their victory will literally mean less… and that’s a shame. The viewers that decide to watch the ADCC will witness less exciting potential matches.
Its not about this year though. Its about the longevity of the sport. Next year… next year is where things will be really interesting. How will events adapt? So yes, I currently think CJI taking on ADCC is good for the sport.
This message is brought to you by copious amounts of panda express. Good day.
