In an interesting discussion during a recent Flograppling podcast, General Manager Ben Kovac revealed a surprising roadblock in the jiu-jitsu business landscape: UFC BJJ’s apparent unwillingness to engage in dialogue with Flograppling.
Kovac, who has been serving as Flograppling’s GM for approximately five months, shared his frustrations about the lack of cooperation within the grappling industry during his appearance on the Flograppling Show. When discussing the challenges of running a jiu-jitsu business, he drew parallels to Silicon Valley’s tech ecosystem where competing companies often find ways to collaborate for mutual benefit.
“I live in Silicon Valley, right? There’s Facebook, there’s Google, there’s Apple, there’s Nvidia,”
Kovac explained.
“There’s this understood idea of sort of cooperation between these companies. They all work off of each other. They all build an ecosystem in some ways together… And I don’t think we really have that in jiu-jitsu.”
The most pointed criticism came when Kovac specifically addressed UFC BJJ’s communication stance.
“The UFC BJJ folks like won’t even talk to us, right? Like won’t even engage in a conversation from what I can tell,”
he stated.
“And I don’t really understand that because I feel like we could probably help each other’s business.”
It’s interesting to see Kovac say this given how much of a head start Flograppling has had in the business. Flo has been a dominant (and often stifling) voice in BJJ for the last decade whereas UFC has mostly flown under the radar. The one exception to this was the Eddie Bravo Invitational for a while – but Bravo seems to have derailed this event enough for UFC to try and develop a home grown event which ultimately got developed into UFC BJJ once the execs saw that Craig Jones was able to get actually decent ratings for a BJJ event.
Kovac added that ‘some’ promotions have taken exclusivity so far that athletes are restricted from working with sponsors who support competing organizations.
“We’re not a big enough sport to be able to silo it off and say, ‘Hey, like we’re not going to work with the other groups,'”
Kovac emphasized.
“That’s really the opposite mentality of like a Silicon Valley and what built that into like the place for tech in the world.”
Since joining Flograppling five months ago, Kovac has gained insight into what he describes as the “really hard” economics of the jiu-jitsu business, noting the difficulty in balancing support for athletes and promotions while maintaining business viability.
Kovac paid homage to the self-titled ‘kingmakers’ in BJJ naming Mo Jassim and Feppa Lopes who each run events and try to contribute. While both Jassim and Lopes are huge benefactors in BJJ, they’re hardly the promotional powerhouses. Lopes’ reach is limited strictly to Brazil – where a BJJ Stars event can bring up to 8000 new subs, hardly blockbuster and Jassim got beaten by Craig Jones despite a huge advantage of handling a brand like ADCC against the inaugural CJI.
This was a fairly funny episode of the podcast, highlighting the fact that five months into his tenure, Kovac still doesn’t really understand the grappling business — especially as it relates to the UFC. The UFC isn’t there to build anything for anyone; it’s there to deliver value to its shareholders. And as for FloGrappling and their suspiciously timed “rescue” of CJI 2, the fact that even a last-minute save wasn’t met with praise says everything about the reputation that media company has built within the BJJ community.
