Matheus Gabriel

Matheus Gabriel went almost eight months without a match before the 2026 Worlds. He arrived in Long Beach surrounded by questions about his rhythm and left with the lightweight title for the second year in a row, capping his run with an armbar. The Checkmat athlete from Manaus, Brazil, has a particular way of building a career: he disappears, heals up and comes back to win.

Matheus Gabriel Pinheiro Barros was born in Manaus on June 10, 1997, and started Jiu-Jitsu in 2006, at age 8, encouraged by his grandmother. As a teenager he spent almost two years in Rio de Janeiro in a scholarship project run by Márcio Rodrigues, and went home when the project ran out of funding. He later moved to Dallas, Texas, and has lived in Houston since 2022.

Dallas is where he joined Checkmat, through Keiser Girão’s academy. He won two no-gi world titles, at purple belt in 2016 and at brown belt in 2017, and in 2018 he won the gi Worlds at brown belt, at featherweight. He got his black belt from Keiser on the podium, at age 20.

He has three world titles as a black belt. The first was in 2019, at featherweight, with an armbar on Marcio André in the final. The other two came at lightweight, in 2025, with a 4-2 win over Andy Murasaki, and in 2026. In 2021 he also reached the lightweight final, but closed it out with teammate Renato Canuto, who took the gold in the official record.

The gaps between titles are explained by injuries. In 2022 he was out for months with a shoulder problem. In 2023 he left Worlds hurt, in the quarterfinals, and spent about 16 months away from competition before coming back at the Lisbon Open in late 2024, with gold in his weight class and the open class. The IBJJF lists reconstructive knee surgery and a serious shoulder injury among the setbacks he has faced.

Before the 2026 Worlds, his last match had been in October 2025, when he lost a decision to Carlos Henrique in a UFC BJJ title match. In Long Beach he had five matches and, in the final, submitted training partner Jackson Nagai with an armbar. After the title he told the IBJJF he plans to compete at Europeans in January 2027.