Craig Jones decided to open up about some of his recent dealings with FloGrappling and he shone on a light on some of the business practices that they employ. The streaming service has a firm grip on the professional grappling world as the only place that fans can watch any major IBJJF events, ADCC Trials, and the ADCC world championship. They create Who’s Number One events themselves and have the streaming rights to a number of smaller promotions from all around the US. This, coupled with the recent acquisition of exclusive streaming rights for Quintet events has meant that there are very few grappling promotions not on FloGrappling.
Many professional grapplers aspire to be on the kind of events that are major attractions for FloGrappling and obviously a lot of negotiations go on behind the scenes, but Craig Jones has recently opened up about what those negotiations look like:
“A professional grappler goes “oh it’d be great to work for FloGrappling, wouldn’t it? What an extraordinary company to do business with.” This is a situation that just happened: “Hey Nicky Ryan, how would you like to come all the way to Houston, on your own dime… Stay overnight, and do a free meet and greet with the fans?”(Ryan’s response) “Oh that sounds great, I’d love to do that for the fans. Can I at least get a hotel room?” FloGrappling: “No you can’t get a f**king hotel room.” That’s what doing business with FloGrappling is like.”
FloGrappling doesn’t just operate as a streaming platform of course, as they also produce some of their own content using footage from those events and footage filmed on location in gyms around the world. Some of the series that they’ve produced have gained a lot of attention over the years and B-Team Jiu-Jitsu has been featured by them a number of times. Jones shared a second video that referenced this relationship as well:
“Here’s another one. FloGrappling: “Hey, can we come to your gym? Can we film your content? an we do interviews with your guys? Can we post it on our channel? Can we post it behind our paywall? and you know what you get? Not even a f**king hotel room.”
JitsMagazine has reached out to FloGrappling to offer the opportunity for them to comment, but has not yet received a response. If and when one is given, it will either be added to this article or run as a separate story and linked here depending on the content.
Craig Jones recently made his comments on Flograppling and their business practices in a recent post to his Instagram story, which MMAUncensored then reshared to their official Instagram account along with him:
