Jozef Chen on ADCC Poland: 'Ah, Americans...' and BJJ's Global Reset
The loudest fight in BJJ this month isn't happening on the mats — it's playing out on social media over a passport. ADCC 2026 has left Las Vegas for Kraków, and a large American slice of the…
The loudest fight in BJJ this month isn't happening on the mats — it's playing out on social media over a passport. ADCC 2026 has left Las Vegas for Kraków, and a large American slice of the grappling internet is not handling it well. Jozef Chen, one of the most-talked-about young athletes in Jiu Jitsu, has now weighed in — and his message to the complainers is, more or less, that the world doesn't revolve around Texas.
Speaking in a new interview flagged by BJJEE, Chen made it clear he is fine with the move, familiar with the city, and slightly bemused by the outrage. "Ah, Americans, you know," he sighed, in a line that has already made the rounds. "Bro, you can go to other parts of the world."
What Chen actually said
Chen's defence of the move isn't a take-down so much as a shrug. He's been to Kraków more than once. He did his ADCC trials in Poland. The country, in his telling, is not some exotic outpost — it's a place he already trains, lives in for stretches, and respects as a grappling nation.
He also pushed back on the notion that ADCC belongs in the United States by tradition. As he pointed out, the championships have hopped continents for as long as they've existed: Helsinki in 2017, Beijing before that, multiple Middle Eastern editions before any of it. "I don't necessarily view it as a change," he told the interviewer. "I view it as a return to what they were doing before."
There's a polite barb in there for fans who arrived at ADCC during the Las Vegas era and assumed Vegas was the natural home of submission grappling's biggest event. It isn't, and it never was.
Poland is not a random pick
The bit of Chen's argument worth dwelling on is the part about Poland itself. The country has quietly become one of the most serious grappling nations in Europe over the last decade. Chen name-checked two of its IBJJF black belt world champions — Paweł Jaworski and Adam Wardziński — but the picture is broader than that. Polish gyms have produced repeat European champions, top no-gi competitors, and a generation of athletes who travel to the US to train and then bring the level home with them.
Pretending ADCC in Kraków is some kind of grappling backwater is, frankly, ten years out of date. Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and submission grappling have decentralised faster than the discourse has caught up to. The center of the sport is no longer one country, and arguably never really was.
The Helsinki ghost
The reasonable American complaint, in fairness, isn't really about Poland. It's about Helsinki — the 2017 ADCC that drew sparse crowds and dampened the atmosphere of an event that thrives on noise. Chen himself acknowledged the comparison, conceding that "apparently it was dead" while the Vegas editions were "pretty crazy."
That ghost is real, and ADCC's organisers know it. But the world has shifted in the eight years since Helsinki. Jiu Jitsu has exploded across Europe and the UK. Poland in particular has a much deeper hobbyist and competitive base now than Finland did then, and Kraków is a far cheaper and more accessible city for travelling fans than Vegas ever was for non-Americans. The argument for low turnout is weaker than it looks.
What this actually means for the rest of us
If you train BJJ and live outside the US, this is straightforwardly good news. The single biggest event in your sport is finally a flight you can afford, not a transatlantic trip plus a Las Vegas hotel bill. European and UK gyms can plan group trips. Asian and Middle Eastern fans can route through one stop instead of two. The event becomes physically reachable to a much bigger slice of the people who actually train Jiu Jitsu.
If you train in the US, the honest read is that you've had a remarkable run. ADCC has been on your doorstep for several editions, and that proximity has been part of the reason American athletes have dominated invites and attendance. It comes back to you. Just not this cycle.
The deeper point Chen is making, gently, is one the sport keeps having to relearn: Brazilian Jiu Jitsu doesn't have a capital. It has hubs — São Paulo, Long Beach, Abu Dhabi, Tokyo, and now genuinely Kraków — and the centre of gravity moves around. ADCC reflecting that, rather than fighting it, is healthy for the long game.
We'll see how the crowd in Poland turns out. Chen, for one, plans on being there. And as he put it, if you really love this sport, the world is a bigger place than the strip in Vegas.
See you on the mats.
Original report via BJJEE.