Roll Call No. 25 — Ffion Davies: Britain's Breakthrough
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Roll Call · The 30 Greatest · No. 25
The first British world champion in the gi and the first British ADCC champion — a Welsh grappler who broke through against the sport’s best.
Career ledger: 2022 ADCC World Champion (-60 kg) — first British/Welsh champion · 2022 IBJJF World Champion (lightweight) — first British/Welsh black-belt world champion · a defining figure of modern no-gi.
For most of jiu-jitsu’s history, the summit belonged almost exclusively to Brazil, with a handful of Americans breaking through. Then a grappler from Swansea, Wales rewrote the map. In 2022, Ffion Davies became the first British black belt to win the IBJJF World Championship, and later that year the first British competitor to win the ADCC — a double breakthrough that announced a genuine new power in the sport.
Her 2022 ADCC run was a statement. Davies submitted her first opponent, then beat the era’s most decorated woman, Beatriz Mesquita, 6–0 in the semi-final, before dominating the final 10–0 to take gold in the -60 kg division. Beating Mesquita — the ten-time world champion — on the sport’s biggest no-gi stage was the kind of signature win that defines a career, and Davies did it with room to spare.
She is, above all, a modern no-gi specialist: technical, composed, and tactically sharp, with a control-based game and a quiet ruthlessness that lets her impose scorelines rather than scramble for them. In a division deeper than it has ever been, she has consistently found herself on the right side of the biggest matches, and she has done it while carrying the flag for a British and European scene that had long punched below its weight on the world stage.
Her importance is not only about medals; it is about possibility. Every young grappler in Wales, in Britain, across Europe who once assumed the very top was reserved for others can now point to Ffion Davies and know better. She is proof that the center of gravity in jiu-jitsu has genuinely gone global, and that a kid from Swansea can beat the best in the world — because one did.
She is the youngest era of this list, and her story is very much in progress, which is exactly why she belongs here: any honest ranking of the greatest has to make room for the people actively defining the present. Ffion Davies broke two national barriers in a single year and beat the most decorated woman in the sport to do it. Britain’s breakthrough has arrived, and she is only getting started.
Roll Call is The Jiu Jitsu Mindset’s 30-part series on the greatest to ever play the game. Records per IBJJF, ADCC, and public grappling databases.