Mikey Musumeci excited for ‘opportunity to fight MMA in the UFC’ after growing grappling as a sport

Musumeci has signed a special contract with UFC as part of the promotion’s move into grappling, but hopes to one day fight in the UFC as well.

Ryan Harkness breaks down daily mixed martial arts (MMA) news, providing unique context to stories that only 15 years of obsessing over the sport can provide, having worked for FOX Sports, Yahoo! Sports, UPROXX, MSN, Bleacher Report, HDNet and CagePotato, among others, before joining MMAmania.com in 2017.

Mikey Musumeci made history last week, becoming the first BJJ practitioner to be signed to an exclusive UFC contract. And while the four-time IBJJF champion intends to focus on growing the sport of grappling through that contract, he admitted in a recent interview that mixed martial arts (MMA) is still on his radar.

“I have the desire to maybe do MMA again in the future,” Musumeci told MMA Fighting over UFC 309 weekend. “I’m young, my body is very young. I’ve never taken steroids, so my body is like 20, 21, actually. I can have many more years of competition still.”

That’s in comparison to another of grappling’s established stars, Gordon Ryan, who continues to struggle through career-jeopardizing health issues. Then there’s Craig Ryan, who is making waves with his Invitational events but seems nearly done with actual competition. The 28-year-old “Darth Rigotoni” hopes to have a long future ahead of him, including actual fights in the UFC.

“Being in the UFC now, I’ll have the opportunity to train with a lot more people that I wouldn’t in the past, and learn from them on the feet, takedowns, wrestling,” he said. “The first thing I loved in life was MMA. If I can have the opportunity to fight MMA in the UFC, that’s going to be a dream, too.”

But first things first: Musumeci is set to be the lynchpin in the UFC’s plans to build out a grappling division. The first step in that process is an appearance at UFC Fight Pass Invitational 9 (UFC FPI 9) on December 5th, where he’ll face Felipe Machado.

“I want to do MMA, but the gift God has given me was jiu-jitsu, so I have to grow our sport first,” he said. “I can’t leave our sport before helping it grow to a place where other people, other kids can have an organization to compete at in the future.”

Musumeci is coming off a 7-0 run in ONE Championship where he helped develop that promotion’s grappling division into must-watch programming. He left under shady circumstances, though, after a last minute switch from a 170 pound match to 135 pound match led to a botched weight cut and a ‘life threatening’ bout of pneumomediastinum, where a rupture in the lungs leads to air in the chest cavity.

Musumeci refused to bad-talk ONE, whose mistreatment of athletes is becoming notorious, but did use an interesting word to describe how things will be better when more grapplers join him under UFC contracts.

“The problem with many organizations now, brother, is that [athletes] are not safe,” he said. “Sometimes they have money, sometimes they don’t. Too much politics. Now, with the UFC, we finally have an organization that will be safe and more professional with other people. My dream is to make this sport grow.”