It would certainly be huge news for the ADCC World Championships 2022 but according to the head organizer Mo Jassim, Ryan Hall might be making his return to the competition. Hall was last seen competing under ADCC rules all the way back in 2011 where he lost in the quarter-finals to Robson Moura, although his highest achievement was in the previous event in 2009 when he came away with a bronze medal after beating Jeff Glover in the third-place playoff. In fact, if he competes at ADCC 2022 it will actually have been a full decade since Hall competed in any grappling match at all.
Since then, he’s been hard at work attempting to make it big in the world of MMA instead, quickly rattling off four finishes on the regional circuit to earn an invite on to the cast of The Ultimate Fighter 22. He made good use of his elite level grappling skills by winning the tournament but his fight schedule slowed to a crawl from there on. He only competed three times in the five years after defeating Artem Lobov in the TUF 22 finale, although he did win each of those fights and register the 2018 submission of the year by heelhooking BJ Penn.
His MMA career took a turn for the worse at UFC 264 when he suffered his first knockout loss to Ilia Topuria and at the age of 36 it might be difficult for him to work his way up to a title short in the stacked UFC Featherweight division. Historically, age hasn’t meant anywhere near as much at ADCC as it does in MMA and older grapplers have still come out on top so Ryan Hall could easily be a legitimate threat at 66kg if he does compete at the 2022 world championships.
The news was revealed in a post to the story of the official ADCC instagram account where they posted a screenshot of the revelation that Jassim gave:
