Lerone Murphy (center) and Carl Prince (right) are leading the charge in Manchester. (Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)
(Chris Unger via Getty Images)
“Yesterday, we were in the casino and a group of guys shouted, ‘Wow, that’s the African guy that got the big knockout in the UFC last night!’
“That kind of thing never gets old for me,” Carl Prince tells me from a hotel room in Las Vegas, the scene of his fighter Lerone Murphy’s biggest test to date Saturday against Josh Emmett in the main event of UFC Vegas 105 at the UFC APEX.
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The knockout artist that elicited such a reaction from the group of gamblers is Adeba Gautier, a Cameroonian who found his home at Prince’s Manchester Top Team, a gym which is rapidly emerging as a new U.K. powerhouse.
“It’s crazy to me, they should see where this guy came from,” Prince says, “he’s been living in the back of the gym!”
It’s become a common occurrence for Prince’s charges to be recognized in public.
Not only Murphy and Gautier, but Dakota Ditcheva — the most mercurial presence in today’s women’s MMA scene — took her fledgling steps in the mixed code at MTT before moving over to the U.S.
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PFL’s European arm has been pumped by the presence of her old teammates Lewis McGrillen and Ibragim Ibragimov, both of whom are considered among the brightest prospects on the promotion’s books and represent the Manchester team’s bumble-bee banner.
Like most Mancunians involved in MMA for a number or decades, Prince is a disciple of the late Karl Tanswell — a U.K. MMA and Brazilian jiu-jitsu pioneer.
“Karl is really the inspiration behind the gym,” he explains. “He always wanted to have a super gym in Manchester that attracted talent from far and wide. I feel like I’ve inherited those goals from him.”
While names likes Gautier highlight the international expansion of his gym, Prince found the nucleus of his project on his doorstep.
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He first met Murphy and McGrillen at Brendan Loughnane’s All Powers gym in Stockport. Soon, he got word of Dagestan wrestler, Magomed Shikhshabekov, training a small group in the area and they joined forces. That initial amalgam sprouted the bud that would eventually become Manchester Top Team, which formally opened in 2019, the same year Murphy made his first walk to the Octagon.
While many businesses suffered when the pandemic hit in 2020, Murphy’s UFC signing allowed the premises to achieve “elite status,” permitting the gym to keep the doors open amid the national lockdown and making it one of the few mats that remained busy throughout England. The likes of McGrillen, Ibragimov and Ditcheva were adding to the buzz created around the gym at a regional level, while “The Miracle” flew the flag on the international stage.
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Notably, none of the aforementioned fighters cut their teeth with Cage Warriors, the most trodden path from the European ranks to the Octagon.
“We wanted to make our own path and it’s worked out well,” explains Prince.
“With McGrillen, we put on local shows in his hometown to build up local interest and then we looked to build up interest in Manchester. I think that helped him to become a national star when he arrived in the PFL.”
A soccer enthusiast, Prince sees the African link with Gautier as a nod to the beautiful game. A Manchester City diehard, he spent time coaching in the U.S. before steering his life back towards MMA.
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The idea to have a feeder team in Cameroon was cooked up in a V.I.P. area in Dubai after coaching Murphy to a win over Makwan Amirkhani the night before.
“I got chatting to this guy who was an advisor to the government of four or five African nations. He told me he had a friend who ran a gym in Cameron with four or five promising fighters. I chatted to him for about five hours and I decided to follow it up,” Prince recalls.
“A lot of these big football clubs have feeder clubs dotted around the world. I wanted to see if we could make that work, and from there we got Maxwell Djantou Nana, who’s coming off a big win in his PFL debut, and Ateba. So it’s gone quite well, we sorted some accommodation for them — right now Ateba is living at my dad’s old house!”
When the UFC came to Manchester in 2024, most people were sure that Murphy’s presence would be facilitated despite his career-high win over Edson Barbosa coming just two months before that.
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When that never came to fruition, he had to be a dead cert for the UFC London card in March, right?
Wrong.
Instead, potentially assisted by an opponent’s refusal to meet him on U.K. soil, Murphy was booked to face Josh Emmett at the much more anticlimactic UFC APEX two weeks later.
“I think we could’ve had a massive impact on that card, and it would’ve worked for the UFC too as they would have been building a new guy in a prominent spot for that audience,” Prince says. “With a win over Josh, he can be the next contender at 145 and we’re very confident we can make that happen. But I certainly think a fight like this could’ve given the fans something to cheer about in London.”
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Prince sees Murphy as the captain of his burgeoning Manchester superpower.
Nothing ever came easy to Murphy, but by embracing discipline he has risen above the many sinister snares of his city. Not only has he improved his own life, but he also provides an example for those further down the ladder.
“He sets the standard in the gym. He’s there 30 minutes before training starts, does everything he needs to do and then stays late to help the younger fighters. He’s been such a great mentor for so many kids in there in the midst of having this massive moment in his own career,” says Prince.
Like Tanswell before him, Prince revels in seeing his fighters gain international recognition built on the hard work his hometown is famed for.
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After McGrillen’s PFL Europe championship-winning knockout in December, it’s seemingly only a matter of time before more accredited honors find their way to Manchester Top Team.
Prince has no doubt about that either, but if it all ended tomorrow, he would be proud of the transformational journeys he’s brought his fighters on — with no better shining example than the captain himself.
“We started from nothing. It was pretty much the three of us — me, Lerone and Lewis,” Prince says. “Lerone never had anything to prove. He’ll walk into a room and even though he’s not a very loud or boisterous guy, people can feel his presence as soon he’s there. He just carries himself in a different way and he always has,” says Prince.
“The biggest thrill I get is seeing my lads get the credit they deserve for the hard work they’ve put in. I know where these guys come from, so to see them in big spots, headlining cards, it just makes me so proud to see them reaching massive milestones like this.”
