When Roger Gracie opened his first academy in London at 21, he wasn’t the untouchable world champion the public sees today. He was a kid in a new country, juggling the impossible: running a business, keeping a handful of students happy, and still training full-time to compete at the highest level of bjj and MMA.
His early partners in the venture, including his father’s student Steve O’Connor and a loud, relentless boxer named Clay O’Shea, helped him keep the place afloat, but Roger often had to leave the academy for weeks at a time to focus on training camps. Meanwhile, the instructors he trusted were doing all the heavy lifting on the mats, shaping students, and running day-to-day operations.
It was during this time that he learned a lesson that would sting more than any submission or defeat in competition: loyalty in BJJ isn’t what you hope it will be.
“One of my first instructors wanted to become my business partner, and when I said no, he left – and since he was our main kids’ instructor he took most of the kids with him. It was the first – and emotionally, the worst – betrayal I experienced, but unfortunately, it wasn’t the last.”
The scenario is almost painfully familiar for anyone who has run a BJJ school: someone gains your trust, sees an opportunity, and instead of building something from scratch, tries to take yours. Roger’s perspective is revealing because of the tension it exposes between the sport’s traditional values and its capitalist realities. BJJ, historically tied to family loyalty and mentorship, is now an industry. Academies make millions, reputations are built on branding, and students pay handsomely for access. Yet, the expectation of blind loyalty still lingers — even as the business reality incentivizes self-interest.
Roger’s frustration is amplified by his own lifestyle at the time. He wasn’t shirking responsibility; he was in camps, preparing for tournaments and MMA bouts, leaving his instructors to manage the day-to-day. He didn’t want a partner — he wanted cart blanche loyalty. And in his eyes, that wasn’t asking for much: show up, teach, lead, and protect the academy he had poured everything into. But as he learned, loyalty in bjj is conditional, and the lines between mentorship, employment, and partnership blur quickly in a world where money and prestige are involved.
This tension isn’t unique to Roger. Gordon Ryan recently sparked debate by claiming BJJ has a loyalty problem, criticizing a generation of athletes for abandoning the lineages and gyms that developed them the moment fame or success arrived. Garry Tonon echoed similar frustrations, highlighting the transactional mentality creeping into modern gyms: students treat academies like a fast-food franchise, expecting service for payment, divorcing respect and reciprocity from their relationships. The younger generation, he argues, is uncomfortable with confrontation, with challenge, and with the friction that made earlier eras of BJJ tougher and more formative.
Roger’s experience sits squarely at the intersection of these dynamics. On one hand, he recognizes the reality that instructors and students are free agents; on the other, he grapples with the emotional devastation when people he trusted undermined the foundation he had built. Over the years, he saw it repeat — instructors leveraging his name, taking students, opening competing academies — and learned, as he writes in The Warrior Mindset: The Tao of a Champion (with an introduction by Tom Hardy), to read the signs he had once ignored.
In many ways, Roger’s story is a cautionary tale about the contradictions baked into modern BJJ. It markets itself as a family-oriented, honor-bound martial art, yet it exists in a capitalist ecosystem that rewards ambition, branding, and opportunism. Students are asked to pay for access, instructors are expected to show loyalty, and yet the entire system incentivizes departures, betrayals, and business opportunism.
