Polaris are busy putting together the teams for the Polaris Squads Intercontinental Championship 2025 and they’ve just announced the full lineup for the European team first. The groundbreaking new team tournament will feature four teams of six elite competitors who will be all be representing different regions, and they will battle it out to be crowned the promotion’s first Intercontinental champions. Given that Polaris is a European promotion, it should come as no surprise that they’ve started out by booking those closest to them. Every single one of the European athletes are all Polaris veterans and they are all among the very best in the world at their respective weight classes.
The lightest competitor in the European lineup is Owen Jones, who had a breakthrough performance at ADCC 2024 in the under 66kg division. He’s been one of the rising stars on the UK circuit for quite some time now and he will be incredibly tough to beat regardless of who the other teams can put forward. Next up is one of several top contenders who normally represent B-Team Jiu-Jitsu; the young Jozef Chen. Chen is a consistently exciting grappler who has burst on to the elite level over the last two years and really started to make a name for himself.
One of the top competitors from Poland, Mateusz Szczecinski, will also be making the trip to the UK to represent his continent at Polaris and he also happens to be the promotion’s reigning welterweight champion. He will be joined by Finland’s Santeri Lilius, a two-time ADCC Trials winner who has proven himself to be one of the very best in Europe even if he hasn’t quite managed to win big at the highest level of the sport on the international stage yet. With the elite leglocks that Szczecinski and Lilius possess, they will be looking to register plenty of submission wins as they progress through the tournament.
They aren’t the only elite leglockers in the lineup though of course. Not only does Jones have some excellent leg attacks of his own, but Eoghan O’Flanagan and Taylor Pearman are both known for legendary runs at ADCC Trials. The final two members of the European team at the Polaris Squads Intercontinental Championshp 2025, O’Flanagan and Pearman both had flawless performances in the under 88kg division on different years. They submitted every single opponent they came across to earn their places at ADCC 2022 and ADCC 2024 respectively, and it’ll be tough for anyone to stop them from doing the same throughout next year.
Polaris announced the full lineup for the European team at the Polaris Squads Intercontinental Championship 2025 in a recent post to their official Instagram account:
