Craig Jones recently revealed that he was able to get out of a FloGrappling contract that should have lasted several matches, and he even explained the loophole he was able to use in order do it. It’s actually something that anyone can take advantage of as well, as it’s a generic feature of multi-fight contracts. Jones has openly criticised FloGrappling for some of their business practices at several points over the years, so it makes sense that he might not want to compete for them. He has competed for their promotion Who’s Number One multiple times in the past though, and he only became aware of the loophole during negotiations for one of these matches.
Jones explained that the multi-fight contract only came about because there was one particular match that he wanted to book:
“Flo(Grappling) wanted me to face Gordon (Ryan), so we were in talks for that, right? Obviously that’s gonna be a significant purse for that match. They didn’t wanna sign a single match deal though, right? So they wanted to sign a multi-contract thing, so they put something together right and I ended up agreeing to the terms I would say. Basically in premise that I was going to do this and we’re trying to book the first match, which is the first bout agreement. And at the time I was trying to book Yuri Simoes, like he wasn’t one of the names on the list but I wanted to get this thing going. I wanted to get moving on this to progress towards the high-paying Gordon match.”
Although potentially not as popular as that rematch with Ryan, Craig Jones vs Yuri Simoes would still have been a pretty big deal for FloGrappling as the first match of his contract. Simoes is a three-time ADCC world champion and he is a very tough opponent for anyone, something that Jones was well aware of too:
“I said to them ‘guys, I’m busy, give me like two months.’ I need two months’ minimum notice to like clear my schedule to put in a proper training camp. Obviously for a guy like Yuri, you don’t want to just three weeks’ notice wing it. But they run show to show, they don’t have a long-term calendar. You’re either on the next show, and we’re not even thinking about what’s after that. So there was all this back and forth and they didn’t even send me the bout agreement until like three or four weeks before. I’m like ‘man, you left it too long. I’m not doing this now, give me two more months we’ll do it later.’ so no bout agreement was ever signed.”
That’s the key element of the negotiation with FloGrappling that allowed Craig Jones to get out of his contract, and he wasn’t even aware of it until one of their matchmakers accidentally explained it to him:
“I was talking to (Riccardo) Ammendolia and he was trying to get me to do the event and he basically says to me, he goes ‘yeah, we might have some of the ONE Championship grapplers on there’ and I go ‘how do you do that, aren’t they under contract?’ and he goes ‘well actually, your contract doesn’t begin until you sign your first bout agreement’ and I was like thanks Riccardo! I appreciate you telling me that little nugget of advice. So I guess I’m not under contract, and I haven’t competed for Flo(Grappling) since. They slipped up, they gave me the out for their own contracts that they were exploiting from ONE Championship I guess.”
The full El Segundo podcast interview with Stuart Cooper where Craig Jones explains how he got out of his contract with FloGrappling was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of B-Team Jiu-Jitsu:
