The Grandmaster Alliance — one of competitive grappling’s most storied affiliations, with over 200 academies worldwide — announced this week that it has suspended both of its co-founders following separate internal investigations.
The organization then spent three full business days trying to figure out who was in charge.
“We always assumed there was some kind of… structure,” said Marcus Delgado, a black belt who has run the Alliance’s San Jose affiliate for eleven years. “Turns out the org chart was just two brothers and a WhatsApp group with 400 unread messages.”
Brothers Eduardo and Thiago Monteiro founded the Grandmaster Alliance in 2004, building it into one of the sport’s most recognized brands. Eduardo handled competition teams and seminars. Thiago managed affiliate relationships and merchandise. Governance, bylaws, and succession planning were handled by neither.
When the board — which, until last Tuesday, consisted of the two brothers and a purple belt named Derek who once fixed the website — voted to suspend both founders, it immediately confronted a problem that organizational theorists call “there is no organization.”
“We looked for the bylaws,” said Derek Simmons, 34, who is now technically the Grandmaster Alliance’s most senior remaining official. “Eduardo said Thiago had them. Thiago said they were on a laptop that got stolen in 2019. We found a Google Doc titled ‘Bylaws Draft v1’ with nothing in it except the words ‘We should probably write these.’”
The affiliate owners, who collectively pay tens of thousands in annual licensing fees, had questions. Primarily: to whom?
“I’ve been sending $3,200 a year to an LLC that, as far as I can tell, is registered to a residential address in San Jose,” said one affiliate owner who requested anonymity. “I googled the address. It’s a house. There is a heavy bag in the driveway.”
Simmons, who has a day job in logistics and originally volunteered to update the website’s event calendar in 2021, has since inherited control of the organization’s Instagram account (287,000 followers), the Shopify store, and what he described as “a spreadsheet that might be the financial records, or might be Eduardo’s meal prep tracker.”
“There’s a column labeled ‘protein’ and a column labeled ‘revenue,’” Simmons confirmed. “Some rows have entries in both.”
The Alliance’s 200-plus affiliate owners have reportedly formed their own group chat to discuss next steps, which has already devolved into a debate about whether to adopt an ecological approach or a traditional approach to organizational governance.
“Someone suggested we vote on a new president,” Delgado said. “Then someone else asked if we’re even a real organization or just a bunch of gyms that use the same logo. That thread has 340 messages and no resolution.”
Sources close to the situation say at least three affiliate owners have already begun designing their own logos, while two others have filed competing LLCs with identical names.
As of press time, Simmons had changed the Instagram password and was “strongly considering” updating his LinkedIn title to “Acting CEO — Grandmaster Alliance.”
The previous title was “Brown Belt / Web Guy.”