The ADCC World Championship is the most prestigious no gi grappling tournament there is, so naturally many fans would assume that the promotion is making a ton of profit. It seems as though this might not actually be the case according to one of the key members of the organizational team behind the event, Seth Daniels. Not only does Daniels work very closely with the current head organizer Mo Jassim, but he also has done plenty of work with his own promotion Fight 2 Win as well. Daniels is undoubtedly one of the most experienced promoters in the professional grappling world, with years of experience behind him at this point.
The work that Jassim has done has been nothing short of incredible over the last few years, as he worked his way up from the lower levels before eventually taking up the role of head organizer during the build-up to ADCC 2019 and hasn’t looked back since. Traditionally there has been a new person in that role for every single edition of the tournament but Jassim’s first event was such a huge success that he was asked to return for ADCC 2022. Although tradition would require a new organizer, that decision proved to be the correct one when Jassim was able to go bigger and better than ever before at ADCC 2022. Naturally he was invited back for a third time to head up ADCC 2024 and he’s currently in the process of putting that edition together.
ADCC 2022 was in front of the biggest crowd that promotion has ever seen and while the income was clearly higher, the production value alone meant that the expenses were also significantly higher. ADCC 2024 will be taking place in the T-Mobile Arena with what will be the biggest crowd in the history of the sport, so fans and competitors alike have started to wonder how much profit the promotion is making. After all, the athletes themselves only receive $10,000 for winning one of the 8 weight classes available and $40,000 for winning the absolute division.
That prize money has been the same amount since the earliest days of the ADCC World Championship and while it’s clear that the promotion’s revenue has been increasing, it’s not entirely clear to what degree the profit has. It’s no secret that the original ADCC World Championship events cost more money to put together than they ever made and according to Seth Daniels, that fact has never changed even with the growth of the sport in recent years. He recently explained that the venue and production cost alone was over a million dollars, and the travel and accommodation for the athletes alone broke over half a million dollars. Although he didn’t go into the details of the revenue made, it’s clear that the cost of staging an event this big takes up a huge amount of it.
Seth Daniels shared the inside information on the profit that ADCC makes (or doesn’t make) in a recent post to his official Instagram account:
