Who Won The Week?

We got three showcase events from professional grappling this past week. They all had different rules and competitors. Now we have to ask, who is winning professional grappling’s arms race?

Brazilian jiu-jitsu has (allegedly) been the “fastest growing martial art” right alongside mixed martial arts for what feels like decades. Now that growth is turning into real opportunities.

This past week gave fans three separate professional jiujitsu events with three distinct rulesets and athletes competing.

The week competitions started with FloGrappling’s Who’s Number One on Tuesday. The final set of regular season matches for The Professional Grappling Federation (PGF) came on Wednesday. UFC BJJ ended the trifecta with a solid card.

There are plenty of highlights to go through but a few athletes stood head and shoulders above the rest.

WNO 32 was this past Tuesday. WNO has been hosting cards of one-off matches. This card was a return to tournaments with two separate 4 man brackets in between several individual matches.

The best way to think about WNO is it’s a jiujitsu event for purists.

WNO promotes submission only matches that are 15 minutes at most. Athletes can accrue warnings throughout their contests but there are no points. If an athlete gets 4 warnings they are disqualified.

The announcer will say who has the “judges’ favor” at select intervals. This isn’t round by round scoring. It’s a way of saying, if the match ended right now, this person would win.

Judges favor is open scoring engineered to say “Hey you’re losing. You need to pick up the pace,” to one of the athletes.

The stand-out from WNO 32 was 20 year old Dorian Olivarez.

Olivarez is an elite grappler. He first qualified for ADCC as a teenager in 2023. That same year he won Folkstyle Nationals.

Olivarez has rare pace and pressure that comes from a lifetime of trying to get opponents to the floor without worrying about being submitted. Even when he is riding an opponent he’ll take his hooks out to stay mobile.

Olivarez got to work hand fighting after they were reset in the middle of the mat.

Olivarez went on to beat Deandre Corbe in the finals through superior wrestling and pace.

These matches were excellent for me, a jiujitsu practitioner and coach. I am the definition of a hardcore fan and the product appeals to me accordingly.

But this type of slow, pure grappling can be hard to watch for those outside of the sport. It is not designed to attract casual fans.

The next event of the week is built to be better suited for general audiences.

The PGF was started by 10th Planet black belt Brandon Mccaghren. He had the vision of creating a live professional jiujitsu event circuit.

PGF has a draft, a fantasy system, and unique rules that include something like a shot clock to increase action. They also divide the matches into a season and playoffs.

Athletes compete as a part of a team during the regular season. Teams compete against one another for points.

The team with the most points splits $100,000 between their athletes. Whichever athletes accrue enough individual wins qualify for a single elimination tournament for an extra $20,000.

PGF is the most ambitious promotion in professional grappling and no one can say the PGF doesn’t produce action.

The problem plaguing The PGF is the competitors. This most recent season didn’t have a single athlete who’s made it to the highest level of the sport.

It’s extremely difficult to build a professional league with athletes that the fans don’t view as the best of the best. This is partly why no casual MMA fans watch Rizin, KSW, or any other promotion that has stellar talent under their brand.

I love the PGF because they’re actually changing the sport. When I spoke to Brandon I was amazed with the vision and follow through. Still they have a huge mountain to climb to solidify their place as a true professional sports league.

Last year the UFC announced they were going to put more resources into producing grappling events. They filmed a reality show, put Mikey Musumeci on most of their promotional material, and started signing athletes.

That hasn’t materialized into the immediate success they thought it would. Craig Jones himself exposed that the promotion is buying views.

Regardless of individual events’ success, the UFC has the money, and legal team, to sign and retain high quality talent. Plus the events have started to produce bigger and better moments.

Long time IBJJF standout and Texas grappling star Lucas Valente upset champion Carlos Henrique with one of the wildest exchanges in recent memory.

Friend of my gym and all around cool guy Declan Moody won a performance bonus with this alarmingly quick back take and rear naked choke.

Adele Fornarino ripped Enriquez’s leg off to hold onto her title.

Two things stand out about UFC BJJ matches. They are done in a bowl and the 15 minute matches are subdivided 3 5 minute into rounds.

The bowl is great. It forces engagement and keeps the action high. The rounds also keep the action relatively consistent, but rounds can often ruin the work an athlete has put in to get a specific position in grappling. Getting a takedown and guard pass against a high level jiujitsu practitioner in five minutes is just really hard to accomplish.

The UFC is using a round by round format to appeal to casual fans. I’m not so sure that that is actually helping.

Professional grappling really only has hard core fans. MMA fans aren’t going to regularly tune in to watch a BJJ event just because it has the UFC’s logo on it.

Have you ever heard the cliché if everyone is your customer no one is? If the UFC is trying to create a grappling product that appeals to every combat sports fan it won’t appeal to anyone. People will just watch something else.

Being able to watch something else might actually be answer our original question though.

It doesn’t take a genius to tell you that the UFC could win professional grappling’s promotional race whenever they wanted. Let’s do some basic math.

FloGrappling is the largest media company in jiujitsu. FloSports is the parent company of FloGrappling.

Last year FloSports announced new fundraising bringing total investment to $100 million, profitability, and an expected revenue of $200 million next year. Not bad!

For comparison the UFC earned $1.5 billion in revenue. Yes, you read that right. Billion. $851 million was adjusted EBITDA.

To think that any promotion could reasonably compete with the UFC is ludicrous.

But what if I told you no one is actually competing with the UFC? Rather, the sport has enough room for more promotions. Time for some more math.

Last year Dana White announced that the UFC would be putting on 14 BJJ events. The UFC has produced three events so far in 2026. Those cards had 8, 9, and 8 matches, averaging 8.3 matches with 16.6 athletes per card.

16.6 athletes across 14 cards equates to 232.4 spots for athletes to compete and get paid. There are 104 ADCC athletes split across 5 men’s divisions and 3 women’s divisions. If the UFC signed every ADCC athlete that would mean everyone could get 2 matches a year. But there are more competitors than that in the sport and two matches a year is not enough for these men and women to live off of.

Maybe we are in a race to see which jiujitsu promotion will be the sports premier organization. But a race implies that there will be other finishers. And us audience members need to do what we can to support the rest of the race’s competitors.

Vote with your eyes as well as your dollars. Watch PGF, watch WNO, and give attention to the leagues that don’t have billions of dollars of backing so they can continue to pay athletes. And don’t forget to buy a ticket to an event when it’s in your area.

Gustavo Batista is an ATOS Jiujitsu standout. After being awarded his black belt by Leandro Lo he switched teams and went on to win the IBJJF World Championships three times as well as the Pan American Championships four times. He did all of this before turning 30.

You might be wondering why we’re covering this guy. How is a gi specialist that relies on restricting movement standing out in such a dynamic wrestling heavy tournament like ADCC?

Batista dominated the second South American ADCC Trials by attacking turtle, quad pod, and back control. Batista got behind all of his opponents and slowly squeezed the life out of them. Along the way he showed some simple and unorthodox ways to use his hooks to maintain back control.