Nicholas Meregali recently shared his thoughts on the Craig Jones Invitational (CJI) and he clearly isn’t a fan of the promotion. It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise of course, as Meregali is one of the key members of the Kingsway Jiu-Jitsu team and there’s still quite a lot of bad blood between them and CJI. It isn’t just because of the ongoing public rivalry between Gordon Ryan and Craig Jones either; a lot of it stems from CJI 2 last year. What is now Kingsway Jiu-Jitsu managed to reach the final of the team tournament and it was initially announced on the broadcast that they lost due to a tie-breaker ruling.
Many people disagreed with the way the winner was decided and the CJI investor announced that both finalists would receive the million dollar grand prize to help deal with the controversy. That didn’t last long at all though, and just a week later that same investor walked back his first statement and declined to pay Kingsway the prize money, as he agreed with the on-air decision. This alone would be enough to sour the relationship between anyone at Kingsway and CJI of course, but Nicholas Meregali has issues with the promotion that actually go back even further than that. He explained that when comparing UFC BJJ with CJI:
“I don’t think [UFC BJJ are] entering the grappling world to lose or to make the industry smaller or to destroy the industry, as was the example of CJI. CJI entered to divide the industry in a negative way.”
Meregali is just days away from making his return to competition at UFC BJJ 5, so he was always going to speak positively about them. He revealed that he plans on his relationship with them going beyond this next event though:
“I think they are entering to add, they are entering to professionalize. They have structure to put me where I want, in the sense of career, brand, finances. The idea is to try to compete four times this year.”
Meregali went on to explain why he thinks the move to UFC BJJ will be a positive decision in his career:
“You performed. Bonus of the night. Your payment goes up. We put you more in the media. Our business grows. And when you see a ladder of people being trained, man, I think this will help grappling a lot.”
He also added that the relatively recent increase in money available in Jiu-Jitsu is a factor too:
“It’s a new sport, man. There’s no money. There’s no structure… Otherwise, we’ll always be competing in the gi here and there. Paying to compete. Or signing to compete with one or another organization here and there. Making a few thousand dollars. It doesn’t make sense.”
The full interview with Nicholas Meregali where he discusses CJI and UFC BJJ was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of Connect Cast:
