The top of the card carries a piece of history the sport has not seen in a generation. When Gordon Ryan announced his retirement in February, citing the accumulated health problems that had shadowed his final years of competition, he vacated the ADCC superfight title, the first time the belt has been vacated in 17 years, since Roger Gracie relinquished it ahead of the 2009 event. The traditional formula, reigning superfight champion against the previous absolute winner, had pointed at Ryan versus Kaynan Duarte, complete with a staged face-off in the cage at ADCC 2024. Instead, on Sunday, September 13, Duarte meets Yuri Simoes for the vacant crown, and the replacement booking carries its own legitimacy: these are the last two absolute champions the event has produced, Duarte in 2024, Simoes in 2022. Simoes challenged Ryan in the 2024 superfight and was shut out 21-0; his résumé earned him the second chance anyway. Duarte, who also defends his 99-kilogram title in the bracket rounds, won the only previous ADCC meeting between them, a 2019 points decision in a match Simoes left with a torn ACL, and the two have not shared a mat since. Seven years, two absolute titles, one vacant throne. Whoever wins inherits the seat Ryan, Galvão, and Roger held, which is as heavy as furniture gets in this sport.
Below the superfight, the field tells the story this site has spent the summer chronicling. Per FloGrappling, only four of the eight champions crowned in 2024 will defend in Kraków: Duarte at 99 kilograms, Felipe Pena at over 99, Ana Carolina Vieira at women’s 65, and Rafaela Guedes at over 65. The other four thrones sit vacated, and the forces behind the absences are the market forces we have been mapping. The UFC’s grappling promotion has contracted a generation of stars, the Tacketts, Mikey Musumeci, Brianna Ste-Marie, into an ecosystem with its own belts and calendar. Adele Fornarino, the Australian double champion, withdrew from this very event to chase the UFC BJJ flyweight tournament instead, the single clearest data point in the migration. And the Craig Jones Invitational, the million-dollar counter-event that turned 2024 into a talent war, cancelled its plans this cycle, leaving ADCC unopposed for the first time in years, and, paradoxically, quieter for it: the Poland move puts the marketing spend in Europe and the broadcast at odd American hours, and the event is, by wide consensus, being slept on. The most prestigious tournament in grappling has never had less competition and rarely commanded less noise. Both facts are downstream of the same market.
None of it dilutes what the two days actually are, because ADCC’s prestige was never only about its headliners. It is about the exam. Five men’s divisions from 65.9 kilograms to over 99 in sixteen-man brackets, three women’s divisions of eight, and the no-weight-limit Absolute, a field of 104 filled half by continental trials survivors and half by invitation. Matches run ten minutes in the qualifying rounds and twenty in the finals, no positive points can be scored in the first half of any match, stalling and guard-pulling cost you, and overtime settles what regulation cannot. It is the ruleset most deliberately engineered to punish hesitation in all of grappling, and it is why an ADCC gold resets careers in a way no other tournament does. Every two years, the sport’s pecking order is re-ranked in one building. This is the building.
The vacated divisions make the open field the story rather than any single favourite, and the names in circulation sketch its shape. BJJEE’s preview leans toward Dorian Olivarez at 66 kilograms, Dante Leon at 77, and, in the selection with the best narrative gravity, Poland’s own Pawel Jaworski at 88, a home-soil pick in front of what will be the loudest crowd the event has drawn in a decade. We will let the brackets land before pretending to more precision than that; ADCC’s recent editions have made fools of firmer predictions, and a tournament with this many vacated thrones is built for a name nobody is currently printing.
One bracket carries a stake beyond Kraków, and it is one our readers already know about. When Andrew Tackett defended his UFC BJJ welterweight title last month, his callout list began with “the winner of the upcoming ADCC 77-kilogram bracket.” Whoever tops that division on Sunday does not just win gold; they walk off the mats with a standing challenge from the most dominant champion in the UFC’s grappling wing, which is the crossover economy in one sentence: the old institution’s medal is now, among other things, a qualification for the new institution’s money. Every finalist in Kraków is auditioning for two markets at once.
So the preview writes itself as a paradox. A superfight for a throne empty for the first time since 2009, four vacated titles beneath it, a field deeper in the middle than at the top, unopposed and under-discussed, staged in a genuine European hotbed in front of the biggest continental crowd the sport has assembled. The brackets arrive tomorrow. The mats go live Saturday morning. And by Sunday night, grappling will have a new superfight king and a new set of names that every promotion, ours included, will spend the next two years writing about. That part of ADCC has never once failed to deliver.
