Why Top Grapplers Are Skipping ADCC: Jozef Chen on BJJ Pay

If you've been following the ADCC 2026 roster news, you've probably noticed a pattern: big names keep turning up on the "not competing" list instead of the bracket. Jozef Chen, one of the sport's rising 88kg competitors, went on The White Monster Podcast this week and gave the plainest explanation yet for why — and it's got everyone in BJJ talking about money.

The $200 problem

Chen told host Declan Moody that he personally paid roughly $200 just to register for ADCC, with no guaranteed payout waiting on the other side. Lose early, and a competitor walks away having spent money on registration, travel, and camp time for nothing. Watch the full conversation on YouTube if you want Chen's tone on this firsthand — it's less bitter than matter-of-fact, the sound of someone doing the math out loud.

That math is the whole story. Superfight promotions have spent the last few years building a different model: guaranteed pay, regardless of outcome. ADCC, still the sport's most prestigious no-gi title, hasn't caught up. Chen name-checked the depth missing from his own weight class and beyond, and Moody added a couple of the absences everyone's been noticing — Diogo Reis, Giancarlo Bodoni. As Chen put it to Moody, via BJJEE: "It's hard to get out of bed if you're not getting paid."

This isn't really new — it's just louder now

Grapplers competing for trophies instead of paychecks is close to as old as organized BJJ tournaments themselves. IBJJF Worlds medals have never come with prize money that matches the training required to win them; that's been true since the divisions were amateur affairs run out of gyms. What's changed is that Jiu Jitsu now has a real alternative. When the only options were "compete for glory" or "don't compete," glory won more often. Now that superfight cards can offer a guaranteed check for a single match, "glory" has to compete with rent.

That's a genuinely new problem for the sport's biggest events to solve, and it says something good, not bad, about where Brazilian Jiu Jitsu has ended up. Nobody was having this argument fifteen years ago because there wasn't enough money in the sport for it to be an argument. Chen and Moody both circled back to that point — the sport is bigger, viewership is up, gear and membership revenue is up, and the logical next step is competitor pay scaling with it. ADCC built its reputation, in part, by being the tournament every top competitor wanted on their résumé regardless of pay. That reputation is now colliding with a marketplace that's finally offering those same competitors a better deal elsewhere.

What it means if you're not chasing ADCC gold

None of this changes what happens on your Tuesday night mat. But it's worth understanding, because it shapes who you'll actually get to watch compete this year, and it's a preview of a conversation that's coming to every level of the sport eventually. Local tournament promoters, gym owners running in-house superfights, even the app subscription model funding your favorite instructional — all of it sits downstream of the same question Chen is asking out loud: what is a competitor's time actually worth, and who's paying for it?

For the hobbyist, there's also a smaller lesson buried in here. Chen isn't skipping ADCC. He's still going, paying his own way, competing at a financial loss relative to what he could earn on a superfight card, because he loves the sport and the event still means something. That's a version of the exact same trade every white belt makes when they pay a monthly membership for a hobby that leaves them bruised and tired but somehow better. The scale is different. The logic isn't.

Jiu Jitsu's business side is finally catching up to its cultural relevance, and growing pains like a thinner ADCC roster are part of that process, not a sign it's going wrong. The sport that couldn't support full-time competitors a decade ago now has enough money in it to make athletes choose between events. That's a strange kind of progress, but it is progress. See you on the mats.

Original report via BJJEE.