Owen Jones Calls Out Mikey Musumeci: 'He Doesn't Deserve to Be the Face of the Sport'

Owen Jones said it on The Charles Eoghan Experience podcast last summer, and nobody really answered him. "I just don't like that they're trying to make him the face of the sport.

Owen Jones said it on The Charles Eoghan Experience podcast last summer, and nobody really answered him.

"I just don't like that they're trying to make him the face of the sport. I just don't like it."

Jones was 21, English, a brown belt who'd just made the ADCC 2024 semifinals. He'd submitted Gabriel Sousa with an armbar in overtime and beaten Gairbeg Ibragimov before losing a hard match to Diego Pato Oliveira. Not a nobody. He's the athlete who'll say out loud what the ranked guys are quietly thinking.

Photo: Photo via FloGrappling / ADCC — Photo via FloGrappling / ADCC

So when he went at Mikey Musumeci, it was worth paying attention to.

The Credentials Question

Jones had two arguments. The first was credentials — specifically no-gi credentials. Musumeci has five IBJJF World Championship titles in gi, which is a monster resume. But Jones' complaint wasn't about the gi. He said Musumeci "actually hasn't even done anything of that value" in no-gi and that "the best guy he's beat is Gabriel Sousa."

Jones himself submitted Sousa at ADCC 2024. Same event, earlier in the day. He was using his own win as evidence that Sousa doesn't represent the top of the mountain.

That's not unfair. Musumeci's ADCC record heading into UFC BJJ showed wins against opponents without the name recognition of Gordon Ryan, Craig Jones, or Kade Ruotolo — who were contractually locked out of the UFC promotion anyway. The distinction matters more than most casual observers realize. "Best no-gi grappler available" isn't the same as "best no-gi grappler." Those aren't synonyms just because the UFC wrote the press release.

This is the fundamental problem with any promotion trying to crown a "face" of a sport during a moment of organizational fragmentation. When your competitors include the IBJJF, submission-only circuits, and independent events scattered across the globe, there's no unified ranking system. No universal standard. The UFC could point to Musumeci's gi credentials, sure, but gi dominance and no-gi dominance require entirely different skill sets. A five-time world champion in the gi doesn't automatically translate to no-gi excellence, though it certainly doesn't hurt.

Jones' observation highlighted a real structural problem: the sport had splintered into multiple ecosystems, each with its own hierarchy. The IBJJF still held enormous prestige through the World Championships and the Pan-Americanos. ADCC maintained its legendary status as the no-gi championship that mattered. But there were also the EBI events, the submission-only tournaments, the independent superfights, and various international competitions. A grappler could be dominant in one realm and unknown in another. Musumeci was spectacular in the gi, but his no-gi resume — while respectable — didn't include victories over the absolute elite that existed at the time.

The Influencer Factor

Jones' second argument is the more pointed one. He flagged that Musumeci "gets bare followers from beating scrubs" and questioned why follower count should determine who represents the sport. "He's got like a million followers," Jones said. "Why is he captain of a team? Why does he get to do that and I don't?"

This touches on something that's become impossible to ignore in modern sports: the relationship between social media reach and opportunity. Musumeci didn't build his 1.2 million followers by accident. He was genuinely early to understanding how to leverage content creation — streaming, YouTube breakdowns, Instagram reels, TikTok clips. Before most elite grapplers took their online presence seriously, Musumeci was already building an audience. That's a real skill, separate from grappling ability, and it clearly mattered to the UFC when they were constructing their roster.

But Jones was right to ask: should it matter that much? Should social media following be weighted equally with, or perhaps even more heavily than, actual competitive results against top opposition? The answer in modern sports marketing is almost always yes, and that's precisely what bothers purists in any combat discipline.

The UFC picked Musumeci. Hard to blame them — five-time world champion, likable, already had the reach. When Gordon Ryan, Craig Jones, Kade Ruotolo, and Andrew Tackett were locked into competing organizations, Musumeci was available and promotable. The UFC's job was to build a product, not to settle BJJ's credentialing debate. They made a business decision, and from a business standpoint, it was entirely defensible. A million followers is a million followers. That translates to eyeballs, which translates to sponsorships, which translates to revenue.

But Jones was onto something deeper. Musumeci's 1.2 million followers didn't primarily come from beating those locked-out names. They came from gi dominance and from being a compelling personality who built his brand while the no-gi competition ecosystem was still forming. He was ahead of the curve on content before most competitors understood what content was. That counts for something in professional sports. It's not the same as a dominant no-gi record against everyone who matters, but it's not nothing either.

The Broader Conversation

Gordon Ryan said as much when UFC BJJ launched, with considerably less diplomatic framing. Craig Jones raised the exclusivity problem explicitly — the UFC's "most decorated grappler" narrative fell apart when you noticed it was written while most of the actually decorated grapplers were under contract elsewhere. The criticism wasn't invented by Owen Jones. He just said it plainly on a podcast without the business incentives that kept older voices quieter. Many established names in the sport had similar doubts but kept them private or softened them for media appearances. Jones, being younger and not yet fully invested in the professional apparatus, had less to lose by speaking directly.

There's also a generational element worth considering. Older competitors had come up in an era where there was less emphasis on building a personal brand, less infrastructure for doing so, and less opportunity for individual grapplers to monetize directly. By the time Musumeci emerged as a competitor, the landscape had already shifted. He was one of the first elite grapplers to truly understand and capitalize on that shift. Younger athletes like Jones watched this happen in real time and recognized that the rules of the game had changed. That likely contributed to Jones' frustration — he was seeing someone succeed partly through channels that were invisible to the generation before.

Where Jones aims wrong is at Musumeci specifically. The sport has never agreed on what "face of the sport" even means.

IBJJF world titles? Musumeci leads that category among active competitors. ADCC performance? Gordon Ryan owns that conversation and will for another decade. No-gi submissions against the toughest available opposition? Different answer. Audience growth fastest? Different answer again. Submission rate? Positional sophistication? Training lineage? There's no agreed-upon metric.

The UFC picked one answer — social media reach, approachability, availability, and yes, proven credentials in at least one major competition format — and called it settled. Jones objected to that selection criteria. Legitimately. But there was never a credentialing process everyone agreed on, and a 21-year-old going on a podcast doesn't create one.

The Performance Question

Musumeci took three rounds to submit an opponent Jones argued wasn't even defending properly. Sharp shot. But Musumeci's also been doing this longer, achieved more in gi than anyone his age had a right to, and ran into the same ceiling every combat sports champion hits eventually: the best guys in the weight class are unavailable or unwilling.

The reality of professional combat sports is that you can only fight the people willing to fight you, and the people available. If Gordon Ryan is contractually bound to Craig Jones' organization, and Kade Ruotolo is locked into submission-only circuits, then Musumeci doesn't have the opportunity to prove himself against them regardless of his own abilities or intentions. That's not his fault. It's a structural consequence of how BJJ's professional landscape developed.

Jones capped it with this: "He's just going to cruise, compete against soft opposition, and that's it."

Maybe. The UFC BJJ calendar has expanded significantly since those initial events — 14 events planned for 2026 represent a serious commitment to depth. The rosters have grown deeper than the inaugural year. If Jones is right about the quality of opposition not improving, the matchmaking will eventually confirm it. Soft opposition doesn't stay soft forever, and more events mean more opportunities for established competitors to face each other.

What Actually Matters

Owen Jones is asking why Instagram followers count as credentials. The answer is straightforward: they don't. They're not credentials in any sport. They're metrics that appeal to sponsors, broadcasters, and casual fans. They're genuinely useful for building audience and generating revenue. But they're not measures of grappling ability.

The problem isn't that Musumeci has a large following. The problem is that in modern sports, those two things have become impossibly entangled. A fighter can be genuinely excellent at their sport and also genuinely excellent at building an audience. Musumeci appears to be both. But when the UFC was constructing their product and their narrative, they had to make choices about who would be prominent. They chose based on a formula that weighted available talent, proven credentials in recognized competitions, and existing audience reach. It's a defensible formula, even if it's not the formula a pure competitive merit system might produce.

The conversation Jones started matters because it keeps the sport honest. It reminds everyone involved — promoters, fans, media, athletes themselves — that there's a difference between who's best at grappling and who's best at being famous for grappling. That distinction gets blurry in professional sports, but it shouldn't disappear entirely. The sport needs voices willing to keep asking whether the right people are occupying the right positions, based on the right criteria.

For now, Musumeci holds his position because the UFC decided that position mattered to their business model. Whether that decision reflects actual competitive reality in BJJ's no-gi landscape remains an open question — one that will be answered or confirmed over time, as more events occur and matchups are made. Owen Jones was right to ask. Whether he'll be proven right by future results is something only the calendar can determine.

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