ADCC 2026: The Throne Is Wide Open. My Honest Read On Who Actually Wins In Kraków

Every two years the entire submission grappling world clears its calendar for one weekend, and for the last decade that weekend had a foregone conclusion stitched into it. Whatever else happened, Gordon Ryan was going to walk through somebody important and the absolute was basically spoken for. That is over. ADCC 2026 lands at the Tauron Arena in Kraków on September 12 and 13, the first time the event has ever been held in Europe, and for the first time in years I genuinely cannot tell you who wins the open division. That is not a complaint. That is the most excited I have been about an ADCC bracket since I started watching.

If you are new to all of this and the acronyms are running together, start with the full ADCC explainer and come back. This piece is not the what. It is the who, and more importantly the what I think, because the honest version of an ADCC preview is the one that actually picks names and lives with being wrong.

Why this edition feels different

Two things changed the whole shape of 2026, and they both happened in the same few months.

The first is the obvious one. Gordon Ryan retired in February, beaten by his own gut rather than any human being, and confirmed he would not defend the superfight. That single sentence reshuffled the top of the sport. The man who had a mortgage on the absolute and the headline superfight is simply not on the card. The throne he sat on for a decade is empty, and nobody currently breathing has actually solved the puzzle of beating him, which means the rest of the field gets to inherit a crown that was never lost in the cage. I wrote a long piece on what his exit does to grappling, and the short version is this. The era did not end with a defeat. It ended with a vacancy.

The second thing is geography. Holding ADCC in Poland instead of Las Vegas is not a cosmetic change. It shifts the travel burden, it changes which European killers show up sharp instead of jet lagged, and it tells you the organisation is reading the same room the rest of us are. The audience for high level no-gi is no longer mostly American. The biggest names in the modern grappling economy are global, the money is global, and the venue finally matches that. A packed European arena for the absolute final is going to sound completely different to a Vegas ballroom, and I think it brings out something extra in the home-continent athletes.

The qualification chaos is the best part

Here is the thing casual fans miss about ADCC. Roughly half the field earns its spot through the Trials, the brutal one-day open tournaments held across every continent, and the other half gets a direct invite based on reputation. That split is why ADCC produces upsets that no other event can. You get a 22 year old who submitted six people in a single day at a regional trial standing across from a multiple-time world champion who got waved in on name alone.

The 2026 trials cycle has been savage. The numbers tell the story on their own. Search interest in the West Coast trials spiked into the thousands this spring, the Asia and Oceania trials are still to come on the Gold Coast in June, and every one of these events is minting a qualifier who has nothing to lose and a full gas tank. The invited stars have to peak once, in September. The trials winners have already proven they can submit a room full of strangers in an afternoon. I would not want to draw one of them in round one, and several of the invited names are going to.

That is the real reason this bracket is open. It is not just that the king left. It is that the qualification system is feeding the field a different kind of athlete than it did even four years ago, and the gap between invited and qualified has never been thinner.

The men's divisions, and where I actually land

Let me put names down. All eight reigning champions from 2024 were invited back, which sets the baseline, and then the trials and the rising generation muddy all of it.

Absolute. This is the headline and the hardest call. With Ryan out, the obvious heir is Kaynan Duarte, who won both his weight class and the absolute in 2024 with one of the most aggressive submission-hunting runs the tournament has ever seen. He is the closest thing to a favourite, but closest thing to a favourite is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because the absolute rewards the biggest, meanest, most finish-hungry grappler in the building and there are at least four of those now. Felipe Pena is a problem for anyone. The New Wave camp Ryan came up in still has the deepest pool of talent in the sport and is hungry to prove the dynasty did not retire when he did. My honest pick is Duarte, but I have it at a coin flip, and a coin flip in the absolute is something we have not had in a very long time.

Under 99kg and over 99kg. The heavyweight picture is where the Ryan vacancy bites hardest, because he used to soak up so much of the oxygen up top. Duarte at 99 and Pena above it are the men to beat, and both of them now have something they did not have before, which is a clear road to being called the best heavyweight on earth without an asterisk next to it. That is dangerous motivation. I expect the most violent matches of the weekend to come from this pair of divisions.

Under 88kg. Giancarlo Bodoni went back to back at 88 in 2024, the first man to do it in consecutive editions, and he is exactly the kind of relentless, positionally smothering grappler the long ADCC final format rewards. He is my safest pick on the whole card. If you forced me to bet one current champion to retain, it is him.

Under 77kg. Micael Galvao is the one I am genuinely giddy about. He won at 77 in 2024 and he is still absurdly young for what he has already done. The kid trains in the Galvao system and moves like the sport's next decade belongs to him. If there is a future absolute champion hiding in a lighter bracket right now, it is probably him, and watching him try to bully bigger men is going to be one of the stories of the weekend.

Under 66kg. The lightest men's division is always the most technical and the most chaotic, and the leg lock era turned it into a minefield. Diogo Reis was electric in 2024. But this is the bracket where a trials qualifier with a vicious leg game is most likely to detonate the seeding, because at 66 kilos one exposed heel ends the night against anyone. I trust the division to produce the single best upset of the event.

The women's brackets deserve top billing, not a footnote

I am going to keep saying this until people listen. The women's ADCC divisions are not the undercard. They are frequently the most technically clean grappling of the entire weekend.

Adele Fornarino announced herself in 2024 by becoming the first Australian to win ADCC gold, and she did it the hard way, with a double gold run through her weight class and the absolute. That is a statement that ages well, and she comes to Kraków as the name everyone else is measuring themselves against. Whether she can do it twice in a row, in Europe, with a target on her back, is one of the most interesting questions on the entire card, and it is getting roughly a tenth of the coverage of the men's absolute. That ratio is wrong and I have written before about why the women's side of the sport is criminally underrated by the mainstream grappling press.

My take on the women's absolute is that it is even more open than the men's. The depth has exploded over the last two cycles, the qualification path is producing serious athletes, and I would not be shocked by a first time gold medalist. Watch this bracket. It will reward you.

What ADCC 2026 tells us about where the sport is going

Step back from the picks for a second, because the bracket is a symptom and the disease, in the best sense, is that grappling has changed permanently in the last few years.

Every name I just listed can attack and defend legs at a level that did not exist when ADCC started. The leg lock takeover is complete, the heel hook decides matches at the highest level, and the ADCC rule set, with its submission-only first half, rewards exactly that kind of finishing pressure. The athletes who win in Kraków will be the ones who treat the legs as seriously as the neck. That was an edge five years ago. Now it is the price of entry, and I broke down how it reshaped the whole meta in the state of BJJ in 2026 piece.

The other shift is the money. ADCC is no longer the only seven-figure conversation in grappling. The arrival of huge-prize events like the Craig Jones Invitational means the best athletes now have options, leverage, and a real career path that does not run exclusively through one biennial tournament. That changes the stakes. ADCC gold used to be the only currency that mattered. Now it is the most prestigious currency competing against several others, and that competition is making the whole sport richer, faster, and more watchable. The system thinking that built modern no-gi, a lot of it traceable back to John Danaher, is now spread across a dozen camps instead of one, and the parity in this bracket is the proof.

The bottom line

ADCC 2026 is the most open championship the event has produced in a decade, and the reasons are the best kind of reasons. The most dominant athlete in the sport's history walked away with nobody having solved him, the event moved to a new continent that has been quietly growing world-class grapplers for years, and the qualification system is feeding the brackets a generation of finishers who do not care about anyone's reputation.

If you want my card in one breath. Duarte in the absolute by a hair, Bodoni to retain at 88, Galvao to be the breakout star of the weekend, a 66kg upset that nobody sees coming, and a women's absolute that steals the show if the cameras bother to point at it. I will happily be wrong about most of that, and the fact that I might be is exactly why September 12 and 13 cannot come fast enough.

Get the history and rules down first if you are new, read why Gordon's exit reshaped everything for the full context, and then clear your calendar for that Kraków weekend. For the first time in a long time, the most important tournament in grappling is a genuine mystery, and that is the best possible thing that could have happened to it.