Claudia Gadelha has just revealed in a recent interview that any athletes who have signed exclusive contracts with UFC BJJ will no longer be allowed to compete at ADCC after 2026. It’s a huge decision that will undoubtedly have major ramifications on the sport, as many of the best grapplers in the world are already signed with the promotion and that number will likely continue to grow. Up until now the promotion has followed a similar format to ONE Championship where although their athletes are technically exclusive, they’ve allowed exceptions as long as it doesn’t appear to conflict with their plans.
In practice at ONE, this has meant that athletes can’t compete in multiple different superfight-style shows but they can still do major world championship events like ADCC. UFC BJJ only had their debut year in 2025 though, so this hasn’t really been put to the test with them yet. This is actually the first year of their operation where they have to consider athletes wanting to compete at ADCC and although Gadelha explained how they’ve approached it:
“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.“
The majority of currently announced competitors for ADCC 2026 have never competed at UFC BJJ but a handful have, and of course there are still dozens of invites yet to be announced publicly. Gadelha then shared a slightly contradictory statement about how UFC BJJ views their relationship with other grappling events:
”We don’t want to compete with anyone. We believe in what ADCC is doing, what IBJJF is doing, we believe that these are different products from what we have and what we are doing here… But we also believe that for an athlete to be able to build a professional career in Jiu-Jitsu, this is the place he or she has to be, because we have consistency. Last year we did six events, now there are ten events this year.”
This is of course only going to be bad news for fans of professional grappling. Regardless of whether UFC BJJ is going to be able to take over the sport in the same way that they have done with MMA, exclusive contracts are going to limit the number of top matches that fans will get to see right now. There are multiple other major promotions like ONE and Who’s Number One or Polaris, and each one of them is building their own roster of competitors. With UFC BJJ looking to enforce their contracts to a greater degree, it raises the question of what that will mean for the level of competition at the ADCC or IBJJF World Championship and what superfights fans can expect to see throughout the rest of the year.
