Major honours
Founded in San Jose in 1985 by former kickboxing world champion Javier Mendez, AKA started as a pure stand-up striking academy, but its location amid Northern California's dense wrestling talent pool turned it into the premier wrestling-based camp on the US West Coast. Frank Shamrock held the UFC middleweight throne here in the late 1990s, and from the late 2000s Cain Velasquez and Daniel Cormier carried the heavyweight and light heavyweight belts in succession, with Luke Rockhold adding a middleweight title. When Khabib Nurmagomedov arrived from Dagestan in 2012 and made AKA his American training base, it became the heart of the lightweight division, a lineage Islam Makhachev has carried forward. Sparring intensity here has long been notorious enough to spark injury controversies, but the reputation for knowing how to defend a belt as well as win one has never wavered. Mendez and manager-coach Bob Cook have held the same posts for more than thirty years.
Record comparison
Bars are scaled to the strongest team in this list.
Club legends
Rivalry
The four-year feud between Daniel Cormier and Jon Jones was effectively a proxy war between AKA and New Mexico's Jackson Wink. Layered on top of that, the collision between Khabib and Conor McGregor made AKA and Dublin's SBG rivals in one of the sport's ugliest gym-versus-gym grudges.