The morning of June 11, a Klaxon alert told me that Tommy Langaker’s name had just dropped off the list of competitors at ADCC, the world’s most prestigious submission grappling tournament.

In this weird, niche sport that I obsess over, this was an early warning sign, a rumble before an avalanche. Athletes who’d spent years trying to reach ADCC were jumping to a rival tournament, the Craig Jones Invitational.

Submission grappling, as a professional sport, is younger than most of its competitors, and some of them are teenagers. There is no unified ruleset or governing body. Full-time athletes regularly enter tournaments alongside part-time hobbyists.

For fans of the sport, the peak of the competition calendar is the Abu Dhabi Combat Club championship, or ADCC, a tournament founded by Sheik Tahnoon Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the son of UAE’s first president and now its national security advisor and brother of the current president.

Held every other year, ADCC is often called “the Olympics of submission grappling,” though few outside the sport even know it exists. It is like the Olympics in one way: the winners earn more in fanfare and prestige than cash, even as participating athletes have become ever more professionalized.

The sport itself can look like wrestling, except you win by making your opponent submit using a joint lock or stranglehold. Since a pin doesn’t end the fight, it’s normal for grapplers to fight from the bottom, working to off balance the top player or entangle limbs. Levi Jones-Leary, who ultimately finished second at CJI, started every match by sitting down in front of his opponent.

No grappler is making a living off prize money, because most tournaments offer little to no prize money. Those who treat it like a job hustle for sponsorships and teach seminars and sell instructional videos.

One of those athletes, two-time ADCC silver medalist Craig Jones, raised several million dollars from unnamed funders to challenge ADCC’s dominance. He scheduled a rival tournament – the Craig Jones Invitational – for the same weekend as this year’s tournament, offering a million-dollar prize to the winner.

With the two organizers fighting over the same competitors, I set up a Klaxon alert on each tournament’s roster.

And in June, it happened. “Has Tommy Langaker said anything about CJI?” I posted in a Discord group for grappling fans. “His name just dropped off the ADCC list.” I found Langaker’s sudden absence surprising, since he had won ADCC’s European trials, a grueling competition in itself, to qualify for this year’s championship.

It took three more days for Langaker to formally announce he was dropping out of ADCC to compete at CJI, Jones’ competing event. Other athletes followed, and Klaxon emailed me each time, as the two tournaments jostled for the best athletes in the sport.

I spent most of the summer obsessing over the fight between these two tournaments and their organizers, and in doing so, I leaned on some of MuckRock’s core tools: FOIA requests, DocumentCloud and Klaxon.

What does it cost to run the biggest submission grappling events in the world?

Jones and Jassim spent the spring and summer sniping at each other over social media, but at the heart of the dispute was money: What does it cost to run the biggest submission grappling events in the world?

ADCC’s main organizer, Mo Jassim, spent lavishly on 2022’s world championship to turn the tournament into a premier spectacle. The UFC’s Bruce Buffer announced fights and taiko drummers played between bouts. When Jassim changed the venue to T-Mobile Arena in 2024, it raised the cost even more.

Many athletes who were competing at ADCC asked why money was going to a venue and not to them, given the brewing controversy around underpaid fighters. Several competitors, including 2022 champion Ffion Davies, said they could make more money in other events, and that doing a tournament just for exposure and prestige wasn’t worth it.

Jassim’s original venue, the Thomas & Mack Center, is part of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and therefore subject to Nevada’s public records laws. And because Jones thought it would be a good troll to hold his event at the same venue as the last ADCC, we can see what both promotions spent in the same place.

I filed three public records requests with the University of Nevada-Las Vegas:

• May 29: the booking contract for CJI

• June 20: contracts and ticket sales for ADCC 2022

• Sept. 9: final sales and contract amendments for CJI

To be honest, I didn’t think UNLV would give me any of this. Events are a big business and I expected the university to find an excuse or an exemption to keep sales figures private. To its credit, UNLV fulfilled each of these requests in about a week, with no redactions.

Did CJI earn enough in ticket sales to cover its huge prizes?

Besides poaching competitors, CJI made waves for its massive prize pool:

• $1 million to each of the two divisions’ winners (Nick Rodriguez and Kade Ruotolo)

• $20,000 for best submission (Lucas Kanard)

• $50,000 for most exciting grappler (Andrew Tackett)

• $10,001 show money for 16 competitors

• Unknown show/prize money for the superfight between Ffion Davies and Mackenzie Dern

• Unknown show money for Gabi Garcia

Jones told podcaster Joe Rogan that a mystery funder was covering costs entirely, and ticket sales would go to charity. The CJI organizers have not released sponsorship figures or ad revenue, which was streamed live on YouTube for free.

So, did its ticket sales equal its prizes? No. But it did net slightly more than ADCC did in 2022.

CJI sold a total of 6,823 tickets. That earned about $864,512 in gross revenue. The Thomas & Mack Center kept $254,952 to cover costs, including what CJI had prepaid, eventually paying out $674,560 to Jones’ organization, the Fair Fight Foundation.

In 2022, its most recent event, ADCC sold 10,238 tickets, earning $1,099,980 in gross revenue.

Across almost all venue categories, ADCC spent more than CJI, despite paying less in rent. It spent $352,823 on services provided by Thomas & Mack, almost $100,000 more than CJI.

ADCC’s total prize pool in 2022 was $230,600, according to its website. The highest payouts went to the winners of the open weight division and superfight – Yuri Simões and Gordon Ryan, respectively. Men’s division winners earned $10,000; women earned $6,000.

Two months after ADCC, Jassim resigned as head organizer for the tournament. Jones has promised to host CJI again. On Dec. 7, he announced on Instagram that he’d secured funding for a tournament in August 2025.

One person who likely out-earned every athlete at ADCC 2022 only briefly set foot on the mats: Bruce Buffer charges from $40,000 to $74,999 for his role as a ring announcer.

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