Mikey Musumeci has just issued a bold public challenge to Sambo world champions in his weightclass as he looks for new opponents to compete against in the ONE Championship submission grappling ruleset. He recently won the promotion’s inaugural Flyweight world championship by defeating Cleber Sousa at ONE on Amazon Video 2 and it seems like he’s eager to get his first title-defense on the board. He’s already been vocal about wanting to broaden his horizons instead of simply competing against other BJJ world champions and has even requested a grappling match against MMA legend Demetrious ‘Mighty Mouse’ Johnson as well.
While fans would no doubt love to see Musumeci take on Johnson, a match against a Sambo world champion would be equally enticing. A battle between two grappling specialists who represent different disciplines is something that ONE Championship would definitely be open to as well, as they recently matched up Rodrigo Marello and Ruslan Bagdasarian at ONE 161. The BJJ black belt won that match in record-time and it would certainly be interesting to see if Musumeci can replicate the same success.
The challenge that Mikey Musumeci issued to Sambo world champions by video went as follows:
“There’s a funny quote from Khabib. He said: “If sambo was easy, it would be called ‘Jiu-Jitsu’.”
“So, let’s have the sambo guys compete against the Jiu-Jitsu people. Let me fight the top world champion of my weight class in sambo and let’s see which is superior in the submission grappling format.”
Musumeci then explained in greater detail in one of his comments on the original video:
“There are two different types of Sambo to my knowledge. One that is combat and amazing for mma and the other is without strikes. I would assume we can consider the Sambo without strikes a type of submission grappling just like jiu jitsu. That is what I am referring to. I say in this interview it would be so cool to experiance the best Sambo athlete because I have no clue what to expect, so it would be super exciting. Never would disrespect Sambo! Obviously combat Sambo might be the best to translate to mma more than jiu jitsu! I am referring to submission grappling and the non combat Sambo”
Mikey Musumeci shared the clip of him issuing a challenge to Sambo world champions in a post to his official Instagram account:
