AIGA just completed their last qualifier and the winner will be going to the championship in 2025. For this event there were a ton of matches and I can't cover them all. Most of the competitors aren't big names, but Team Al Leone had Jozef Chen, PJ Barch, Owen Jones, Kenta Iwamoto and Lucas Kanard, so I decided to cover their matches. This of course biases that stats a bit, but I think it is more important to just cover the high level matches. Take a look below to see exactly who was on the team and then check out the results.
Results
Team Al Leone def Italia 2.0
Team Battle Force def Team Oagan
Team Al Leone def Team Brothers
Universal Fighters def Team Oagan
Universal Fighters def Battle Force
Italia 2.0 def Team Brothers
Al Leone def Universal Fighters
Al Leone will be going to the AIGA championship next year to face Team Kasai, Checkmat, Eurotrash and 10th Planet for a chance to win $1 million.
How People Won
Here you can see that stats and there was only one point victory. Of course most of these matches were mismatches, so take the results with a grain of salt. However when it comes to watchability, these matches had it. As I said before I only covered the Al Leone matches because those were those only ones that had people I was familiar with.
All that said there were a lot of good finishes and interesting techniques, so I think it is definitely worth watching and of course studying.
Stats
How often do you see a win by omoplata? We got mostly leg locks, but there was a good variety of subs here. I was thinking that the year to date submission stats would mostly stay the same since I last updated them in November. Now I'm guessing there will be a good amount of change.
We got a lot of double and single legs here. A big reason for that was the rules. In AIGA you aren't allowed to pull guard without grips, so many chose to shoot from distance. Overall the takedown completion percentage was fairly high at 47%.
The sub sweep came out on top here. People have been asking about this, so I'll explain it. A sub sweep is a sweep that happens because someone defends a submission. Someone rolling out of a heelhook and ending up on bottom, or ending up in bottom mount because you're trying to get out of a guillotine, are examples of sub sweeps.
The bodylock came out #1 here followed by the float pass. Many people seem to be inspired by Jozef Chen and used his butterfly half floating style to move into mount recently. I know one of them was by Jozef himself here though. There were a lot of halfguard pass attempts as well, but they weren't so successful.
We got finishes from almost every position except the back, which is a bit strange. However I was happy to see people using the mount and side control again to secure submissions.
As you'd expect there was a ton of action and it was very watchable. When only 1 match doesn't end in a finish, you know it was good. Unfortunately all the matches on the card weren't quite as good, but the Al Leone matches were very fun.
Overall
Although these qualifiers are a bit too long, they always have good action. Alot of the stuff we saw will definately be in people's highlight reels in the future. This also got me hyped for the championship, where all the teams will have highlevel pros going at it for $1 million.
EBI and Nogi worlds are comming next week, so check back for that and get ready for the year end wrap up. You can check out some of the AIGA matches below and trust me, all of them are good.
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