How Man City's multi-club model helped to unearth the next generation of UFC stars

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Manchester Top Team head coach, Carl Prince, has taken inspiration from his beloved Man City to help scout the future stars of the UFC.

Manchester Top Team head coach Carl Prince with Ateba Gautier after his victory at UFC 318.
Manchester Top Team head coach Carl Prince with Ateba Gautier after his victory at UFC 318. (Image: Photo by Cooper Neill/Zuffa LLC)

It takes Carl Prince only a few seconds to recall the moment that, to him, perfectly sums up what Manchester Top Team is all about.

Earlier this year, Prince was walking through a Las Vegas casino with one of his newest fighters when a simple interaction left him feeling like he had won the jackpot.

"I was walking through like a Las Vegas casino with a kid I brought from Cameroon and there were people stopping him, saying: 'You're that guy from the UFC,'" Prince recalls.

"That was a thrill. People who didn't know him from 'Adam' recognised him just because he showed up every day, worked hard, and subscribed to the message."

The fighter in question was 23-year-old Ateba Gautier, who announced his arrival on the world stage a few days earlier by defeating Jose Medina on his UFC debut in Mexico City and earning a tidy $50,000 'Performance of the Night' bonus for the first-round knockout.

Gautier only moved to Manchester from Cameroon three years ago, but his arrival in the UFC represented a new milestone not just for him but for the gym that helped shape him: Manchester Top Team.

"He made sacrifices most people don't understand," says Prince. "But that was a moment of real vindication - for him and for everything that we've built here."

Manchester Top Team head coach, Carl Prince.
Manchester Top Team head coach, Carl Prince. (Image: Picture Jason Roberts / Manchester Evening News)

When Prince first opened the doors of Manchester Top Team in 2019, he did so with a wealth of experience to his name, in both fighting and mentoring, and was determined to transform the lives of many through the discipline of mixed martial arts.

Prince hails from Middleton and he is as Mancunian as they come. However, it was in the United States - first with the New York Red Bulls and later while coaching at a High School in New Jersey - where the foundations of his coaching master plan were laid.

"I originally went over there for Red Bull, did that for about a year, and then worked with a couple of our organisations, United Soccer Academy and some other places," he recalls.

"I then ended up teaching at a Division Three school called Fairleigh Dickinson, girls' soccer and things like that. I stayed over there for about 10 years and then came back from there and started working at a boxing gym in Bolton called Elite Boxing.

"I was training alongside that, then got to mid-30s and retired from training and then I just took up coaching, and the first two kids that I stumbled upon were Lerone Murphy and Lewis McGrillen. And then 10 years later, it's all come to fruition really."

What began as a regional project quickly gained national attention. With fighters like Murphy, McGrillen and PFL superstar Dakota Ditcheva rising through the ranks, Manchester Top Team became one of Europe's top gyms. But Prince still wasn't satisfied.

That soon changed after an impromptu conversation with an African dignitary at a UFC 267 after-party in Abu Dhabi, which led to the 44-year-old, inspired by his beloved Manchester City, hatching plans to make Manchester Top Team a global force.

"Lerone fought against Makwan Amirkhani - I think it was in the UAE - and I went to an after-party and everyone was out there doing whatever you do at an after-party," explains Prince.

"But I ended up chatting to an African dignitary, a guy called Liban Soleman, and he's the advisor to the governments of Gabon, Rwanda and multiple others. I was chatting to him, and he said they had a gym in Cameroon that had just started out, mostly boxing and sambo, and they'd like to give the guys an opportunity.

"I ended up chatting to him for about four hours, took his details and followed up the next day. And then about six months later, Ateba [Gautier] and Maxwell [Djantou Nana] appeared, not knowing a word of English and testing my GCSE-level French.

Manchester Top Team head coach Carl Prince with Ateba Gautier after his victory at UFC 318.
Manchester Top Team head coach Carl Prince with Ateba Gautier after his victory at UFC 318. (Image: Photo by Cooper Neill/Zuffa LLC)

"For me, mirroring the football model and having a 'feeder club' in Africa is something I got from the likes of Manchester City; maybe they have things in Sierra Leone. It was always my goal; I knew it was an untapped region of the world."

When Prince sat down with The Manchester Evening News at Top Team's headquarters in Ashton-under-Lyne earlier this year, more than four years on from those prospective talks at UFC 267, his office overlooked the mats where, despite training finishing more than an hour ago, Gautier was still putting in the hard yards ahead of his UFC bout in New Orleans on July 19.

"It's worked out fantastically so far," says Prince of Top Team's multi-gym partnership. "Forget about technical and tactical understanding, if you get an athlete like Ateba and Maxwell Djantou Nana - our first two recruits from that region - and bring them over to England with the instructions that we've got here, with the guidance we've got here... the rest is easy. I've got a cheat code in the system.

"We're just scratching the surface of that project and the surface of their development. They'll go on to achieve great things, I'm sure."

Over the weekend, Gautier and Djantou Nana underlined exactly why they had uprooted nearly halfway across the world in pursuit of their dreams as they extended their winning runs in their respective promotions, the UFC and PFL, to 2-0 with dominant performances in the heavyweight division.

After a couple of hours spent in Prince's company, it is easy to understand why the likes of Gautier, Djantou Nana, Murphy, and McGrillen have all placed unequivocal trust in the head coach.

But what is it that fuels him to ensure that Top Team remains successful?

"It's a good question really," he ponders. "It would probably go into my inner psyche, some of my upbringing as a kid. My burning desire comes because I tell people that I truly want to be the best that's ever done it, and I won't rest until we get there.

"The burning desire to keep pushing forward is because the dream doesn't sleep; the dream does not sleep at all, and I've got a fire inside me that the guys call the 'unquenchable thirst'.

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"We're working on a legacy here. I'm from a town called Middleton and we've had some big names from there - like Steve Coogan, Paul Scholes. On a personal level - not to make it about me at all because it isn't about me, it's about these guys - I want to be known alongside these names and people who have come and made an impact from that town, and I implore people to do the same.

"Lewis [McGrillen], I want him to be the biggest name ever in Wythenshawe; Lerone [Murphy] the same from his town, Manchester, Levenshulme, Stockport.

"I want us to be known as the guys that people can look up to in those areas and say: 'Just because we were born here, it doesn't mean we can't achieve that'. And Ateba has a great chance of doing that, being from Cameroon.

"Now he's already got people pointing at him, saying: 'If we work hard, we can get that'.

"I want to show people we don't have a gift; the only gift that we've got is hard work and dedication and a great mindset.

"I want to show people that you don't need to have an exceptional gift. I wasn't blessed with the greatest genetics. I was blessed with the greatest mindset; I was blessed with having the most competitive edge out of anybody I knew, to the fact that it probably upset my whole family as a kid, that I was always like the burning desire to win. Winning is everything to me.

"I want to win at all costs. Like all costs, to my detriment at times. Like, I'm never satisfied being like: 'Oh right, you won that one', I want to win the next ten. I always say it to the guys, there's a policy about 100-0. I call it 100-0. I don't just want to win 3-0, I want to win 100-0 to the point where you don't want to ever go anywhere near one of our guys again because you know you're in for a tough night.

"So that's what we're working on, having that reputation that if you're going to go with these guys, you're gonna be up for a hell of a bad night."

Such ambition has been a driving force behind Manchester Top Team’s rise as a premier breeding ground for UFC contenders and PFL superstars over the past six years. Prince's next objective, however, is one that strikes closer to home.

"We're in a decent-sized premises now, but we want to improve this threefold, make the area much bigger, kind of mirror the UFC Performance Institute, where we've got a big strength and conditioning area, a massive matted area, two cages," says Prince, outlining his vision for the gym.

"The school which we have here, we want to extend upon that. We have 12 kids, we want 100 kids in that. So yeah, any dream that you've got, any vision you've got is really, the ceiling is the ceiling that you're creating.

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"I'm not in the business of creating ceilings, so I'm sure once we get to that point, I'm going to want something even bigger and better and beyond that.

"We don't want to just offer Manchester Top Team in Tameside, we want to try and get a place perhaps in North Manchester, South Manchester and then grow like sister academies, where we will offer the same service as here but reach more people and impact more people's lives, and offer people more opportunities.

"For us, fighting and football were always the only way out, so hopefully we can get to a point where kids from the age of 15 to 18 can train for free. That's my next goal.

"Once we get to the new academy, we'll be able to do that. And then we'll keep growing and growing and growing beyond my wildest dreams and expectations."

Prince laughs: "And maybe then I'll rest!"

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