Joao Gomes has had a fantastic time in 2023, first by becoming a Premier League footballer and then by being promoted to blue belt in BJJ. Gomes is a fantastic player who was born in Rio De Janeiro and started playing for his local club Flamengo at the age of just 8 years old. He continued playing his way through their youth system for 11 years before making his first-team debut in 2020, quickly becoming a regular player for the team that very same season. Over three season in total, Gomes went on to make 122 appearances for Flamengo before attracting the attention of top teams in the UK.
He was bought by Wolverhampton Wanderers on January 30th, 2023 for a transfer fee of 18.7 million Euros. Gomes turned 22 shortly after he made the transition to England and he finished the rest of the 2022-2023 season by making 11 appearances for the club. He’s been a long-time practitioner of BJJ, somewhat unsurprisingly seeing as he was born in Brazil himself, in order to improve his mobility and stamina. Now it seems as though Joao Gomes has been getting back on the mats in a big way during the off-season, as he’s just been promoted to blue belt in BJJ by Mauricio Weibel.
Gomes is far from the first professional football player to take up BJJ in his spare time, and it’s actually becoming increasingly more common among elite athletes from other fields. In fact, another Wolverhampton Wanderers player Carl Ikeme took up BJJ in his retirement and even competed in the sport as well. Not all sportspeople wait for retirement though and many train hard even while they’re at the top of their respective sports, like Gomes. NFL Lineman Will Gholston is another of those athletes who’ve decided to spend some of their free time learning how to do BJJ.
Mauricio Weibel announced the news that he had promoted Premier League footballer Joao Gomes to BJJ blue belt in a recent post to his official Instagram account:
