William Tackett Skips ADCC — and BJJ's Money Problem Shows
One of the best no-gi grapplers in American BJJ won't be at the sport's most prestigious event this year, and his reason has nothing to do with injury, rivalry, or rankings. William Tackett — a…
One of the best no-gi grapplers in American BJJ won't be at the sport's most prestigious event this year, and his reason has nothing to do with injury, rivalry, or rankings. William Tackett — a two-time ADCC Trials champion — laid it out plainly on the FloGrappling Show this week: competing at the ADCC World Championships would cost him money.
"Right now I'm making more money than I would make competing for ADCC and I'm getting the right type of match per year that I want," Tackett said, as reported by BJJEE. You can watch the full conversation on YouTube, and it's worth your time, because he's not being bitter about it. He's being an accountant about it. And that, more than any bracket announcement this season, tells you where professional Jiu Jitsu is right now.
The prestige economy is finally meeting a real one
For most of ADCC's history, the deal was understood by everyone: you don't do it for the money, you do it because it's ADCC. The event sits at the top of the sport's mountain, gold there rewrites your legacy, and the payday — such as it is — comes later, indirectly, through seminars, instructionals, and sponsorships. Generations of grapplers accepted that trade because there was nothing else on offer. Plenty of athletes ran fundraisers just to make the trip to Trials.
What's changed is that there's now a competing bid. Tackett recently moved from Austin to Las Vegas to chase UFC BJJ opportunities, stepping away from years of coaching at Fight Factory. For the first time in his career, he says, competing is the full-time job rather than the thing squeezed around teaching classes. When a promotion pays you properly and regularly, the old prestige-for-exposure arrangement stops looking like an honour and starts looking like a pay cut — his words, more or less.
There's a colder piece of logic in there too, and it's the part every aspiring pro grappler should sit with. Tackett argues that competing for free actively lowers his price: if promoters can watch you give it away on one weekend, why would they pay your number the next? By limiting himself to paid matches, he drives his own value up. That's not mercenary — that's how every other professional sport works. Jiu Jitsu is simply late to the conversation.
What this means for the rest of us on the BJJ mats
If you're a hobbyist, none of this changes your Tuesday night training. But it should change how you watch the sport. The athletes whose techniques fill your YouTube study sessions have mostly been subsidising your entertainment with coaching jobs, seminar grinds, and thin margins. A world where a talent like Tackett can say "competing is my full-time job" and mean it is a healthier sport — even when the immediate cost is a thinner bracket at the event we all love most.
There's history rhyming here as well. Gordon Ryan spent years publicly hammering the economics of elite grappling; the growth of paid superfight cards was the first answer, and UFC BJJ's arrival with real contracts is the second. When the money finally shows up, brackets built on prestige alone have to compete for talent like everyone else. ADCC still holds the deepest fields and the heaviest legacy in the sport — but legacy is now negotiating against a paycheque, and this year, for one of America's best, it lost.
The genuinely encouraging part is that Tackett hasn't closed the door — the itch is clearly still there. His 2022 ADCC run ended in the first round against Mateusz Szczecinski, a two-minute appearance he openly says never gave him a proper ADCC experience, and he'd love to get back out there and fix that. This isn't a retirement from the sport's biggest stage; it's a negotiation with it. If ADCC wants the best Brazilian Jiu Jitsu athletes in their primes, the message from Las Vegas is simple: the honour is real, but the maths has to work too.
Watch this one. Whether ADCC answers with bigger purses or simply absorbs the absences, the outcome will shape what a professional Jiu Jitsu career looks like for the next generation coming up through your academy right now. See you on the mats.
Original report via BJJEE.