Craig Jones recently sat down to give an incredibly detailed perspective into the financial side of BJJ, explaining how someone can actually make money as an athlete in the sport. It’s becoming something of a theme for Jones lately, as he’s been tackling some important topics in BJJ and giving surprisingly keen insight into them. That doesn’t mean he’s completely stopped joking around of course, but this is about as serious as fans can expect to see him.
The first aspect of making money in BJJ that Craig Jones decided to tackle was perhaps the most obvious, which is actually teaching the sport to other people. The vast majority of coaches will get their start working as one of the instructors in the gym they train at, but Jones explains why that isn’t a viable strategy long-term:
“To emphasize this: There’s no future in your career unless you open your own gym, run your own business. You will never be comfortable, make enough money to live, in this sport if you just work for someone else. It works well in the short-term because you can teach, you can make enough money to live, and you will not have to deal with all the stresses of being the boss and stuff. Running a gym is horrible, dealing with new people is f*cking horrible. Sometimes it might be better to take a paycut and just teach classes. Less stress involved, but again you will never make any real money if you’re doing that.”
The next level of making money in BJJ above teaching a general class is actually getting paid to teach private classes to a smaller number of students, usually one. Jones explains that this might be worth some pocket money, but it’s not a big earner:
“If you’re a nobody purple belt you might make $50 a private and you might have to give 25% back to the gym-owner to pay overheads. If your gym owner likes you he might not make you do that but again, a lot of people do.”
The next stage again is actually travelling to other gyms in order to teach seminars. Craig Jones is just one of many hundreds of top competitors who have made pretty handsome sums of money in BJJ by going on seminar tours around the world. He spent a minute breaking down how those deals usually work at the start too:
“Initially, when you start teaching seminars it’s always gonna be flat-rate. The gym-owners gonna say ‘hey I’m gonna pay you X amount, no matter how many people come to the seminar’. That’s how most people started, that’s how I started.”
Beyond teaching the sport the next most common way of making money in BJJ is by actually competing, which is something that Craig Jones is very familiar with. It’s pretty common knowledge that there isn’t a lot of money involved in winning the various different world championship events in BJJ, and most competitors will make more taking superfights instead. Jones also gave a great insight into how much you might expect to get paid for a superfight in the early days:
“Because you won a gold medal at ADCC, because you won a gold medal at IBJJF worlds, doesn’t mean you deserve to get paid f*cking anything in a superfight right? FloGrappling, (UFC) Fight Pass, these types of shows; they profit by selling new subscribers. So, is your match gonna sell them any new subscribers? That sort of understanding is what dictates how much money you deserve to be paid. That might mean that you deserve to be paid $0. If you bring no value to the show, if you bring no new subscribers to the show, no people are tuning in to watch you then you really don’t deserve to be paid.”
Alternatively, one of the benefits of superfights is that if you can become an elite competitor that people want to watch then you can command higher purses. Someone like Gordon Ryan makes a lot of money competing in superfights and Craig Jones explained the kind of amounts that the top level of BJJ athletes can command:
“However, if you are a name, if people are gonna tune in for you, you’re gonna get paid. Some of these shows will pay guys as low as $1500 to show, $500 to win. Maybe even throw in a submission bonus, they want a submission… You could compete for Flo or Fight Pass, you could get as low as $1000-1500. You could get as high as $150,000. Again no matter how many gold medals you have, that doesn’t mean you’re gonna fall on this end of the spectrum. It’s your ability to sell the show.”
By the time BJJ athletes have gotten to the point in their careers that they are able to make money by taking superfights and doing seminar tours, they’ve probably already stumbled across another revenue stream anyway. Athletes also have the ability to negotiate paid sponsorships, and Jones has some great advice for making sure they can make the most out of it:
“Sponsorships falls in the same vein as superfight payments, you know what I mean? If I own a company and I want to get that company some exposure, I pick an athlete with a following. I pick an athlete that at least creates content, you know what I mean? I’m not gonna pick an athlete that I’m gonna send him a f*cking kimono and he’s gonna take a photo of it and post it on his story and be like ‘thanks Hyperfly!’ That’s the lowest form of advertising the brand that’s supporting you, that’s them giving you charity here. If that’s the type of marketing you’re doing then you don’t deserve any money from that company.”
The final way that BJJ competitors and coaches can make money in the sport is one that Craig Jones has made good use of himself, which is selling instructionals. While this wasn’t always the case, in the modern era this is actually the most lucrative revenue stream available to competitors when considering the time investment. Jones explains why:
“The peak money-maker for Jiu-Jitsu athletes, thankyou Michael Zenga, thankyou Bernardo Faria, is BJJ Fanatics. Now BJJ Fanatics, you could make f*cking no money or you could make incredible money. This is the number 1 thing that’s taken guys into completely changing their life. Before BJJ Fanatics for me I was doing seminars, seminars, seminars; 75/85 seminars a year, killing myself. But obviously like I said, now I can film for 2 days and that product can continue making me money forever.”
Craig Jones also had some great advice for anyone looking to make money by selling BJJ instructionals too, something that young grapplers might be able to use as a roadmap in the future:
“People buy instructionals to solve a problem. So you need to think of a way to create a product that solves a problem. So it might be fundamentals, it might be a position that’s new that people aren’t familiar with that you can sort of provide some cutting edge answers on. But remember who does Jiu-Jitsu, over 35-year old lonely, semi-chubby white guys. That’s the cream of the crop for the Jiu-Jitsu instructional market so obviously if you’re gonna be teaching insanely difficult high-level movements, that instructional’s not gonna sell massively. You want something that everyone can do and you wanna explain it in a way that everyone can understand.”
Craig Jones explained how to make money in BJJ in a recent video that he uploaded to the official YouTube channel of B-Team Jiu-Jitsu:
