ROH News: Ring Of Honor No Longer Heading To Madison Square Garden In 2019

Coming on the heels of news that Madison Square Garden management has been displeased with their long-standing relationship with WWE over the past couple of years (you can find that here), we’ve noted how ‘The World’s Most Famous Arena’ has been reaching out to other wrestling promotions about running the venue.

Last week, Sinclair Broadcasting (the parent company of Ring Of Honor) CEO Chris Ripley revealed that they were looking to secure the building for an event in 2019 (check that out here). The speculation was that it could be for a possible All In 2 show, as well as having it take place during WrestleMania 35 weekend. As we know, WrestleMania 35 will be coming to the area at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey with all of the WrestleMania week events taking place at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

Today, Mike Johnson of PWInsider spoke with ROH COO Joe Koff to promote the upcoming Best In The World pay-per-view on June 29th and asked about them running Madison Square Garden:

“You know, I’m going to tell you Mike because you are asking.  I’m not going to discuss beyond this statement because I am not going to litigate this in the press.  We had a deal with [Madison Square] Garden and they then told us they were backing out after communications from the WWE.  We are not able to get any other dates in any kind of discussion.  I’m expecting that our lawyers will be contacting all the parties involved and the best we can hope is that we can find a resolution, so we can bring the kind of energy and excitement that ROH and our partner New Japan to a bigger audience and to bigger arenas and to the fans of New York City.”

When asked if there was still a possibility of running the venue at all, Koff responded with the following:

“There is no date and the discussion is going to end here on that.”

Currently, the Mexico-based promotion AAA still is looking to get into MSG in September and there’s no word yet on if that is also no longer going to take place.

EA’s Take: Not even remotely surprised. I’m sure this will lead to hatred towards WWE, but quite honestly, the bottom line is that’s the agreement that Madison Square Garden reached with them. I’d love to know the exact details of it and I’m assuming there has to be something in writing for WWE to be able to do it. Either that or WWE made a commitment to start running there for television again. Our own Greg DeMarco speculated that perhaps NXT TakeOver over WrestleMania weekend gets shifted to The Garden. If that’s the case and I’m MSG management, I’d be more than happy to do that over ROH because you know for a fact that TakeOver will sell the place out. It still remained to be seen if ROH could pull that off.

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