Thanks for Nothing, Forbidden Door

Bound for Glory is in the books and with it the reported end of the partnership between Impact Wrestling and AEW.  And like I and several other people have warned over the past year it was a very one sided affair in favor of AEW.  That’s not a dis on those guys but wrestling history is full of partnerships and just about all of them ended badly for one of the companies involved.  That this one would follow in those footsteps should come as no surprise.

And to call this one sided would be an understatement.  Impact completely jobbed out their champion at the time, Rich Swann, first in a six man tag and then for the title against Omega in a title vs title match.  The Good Brothers and Don Callis went over to AEW Dynamite to work some matches, pal around with Omega and the Bucks, and work more matches on Dynamite than any of the women in AEW.  But no one else from Impact got any run on AEW Dynamite, the nationally televised show with a million viewers ever week.  They moved their biggest show of the year, Bound for Glory, to a 10:00 PM start time on the East Coast because Dynamite was coming on Saturday that night.  (Moving your most important PPV of the year to accommodate a TV show that got 575,000 viewers that night is an all time on brand move for Impact, by the way.)  None of the dream matches that their roster was tweeting out came to fruition.  And Tony Khan cut several promos burying Impact on Impact TV!!    

Now here’s what Impact got in return for their contributions:

• A ratings pop for Omega’s first night on the show, followed a drop that regularly put them below their pre-Omega ratings numbers.
• A buyrate spike for one pay per view
• Matt Hardy showed up with Private Party a few times on Impact Wrestling

That’s it.  None of the Knockouts got any run on Dynamite, none of the AEW Women made their way over to Impact, and no one of note outside of Christian ever did anything of note on any Impact broadcast.  And let’s get to Christian.  I and a lot of people swore that once Kenny Omega won the Impact title that he would never lose it back to anyone on the Impact roster, and boy were we right.  Nope, Omega instead lost it to Christian who then lost it to Josh Alexander at Bound for Glory.  So he beat an Impact guy and lost it to an AEW guy who has history in Impact instead of an Impact guy.  Nice work there, Tony Khan.  Seriously he got one over on Impact real good.

The moral of this story is mommas don’t let your babies grow up to make a partnership with another wrestling company.  I guess they can take some solace that Tony Khan didn’t steal a handful of guys from their roster as is usually the case with these partnerships.  But Tony hit all the other spaces on wrestling company partnership bingo.  And again, that’s not a knock on him.  The game is the game.  And speaking of The Game, the HHH quote that WWE would do business with other companies if it was their best interests should be ringing very loud to us all.  Because that’s how this stuff works.  When companies announce partnerships, one of them has a plan and the rest don’t and the one that has the plan is that one that will walk away with all the chips while everyone else is wondering what happened.

And this goes for another one of the Forbidden Door partners, the NWA.  Since they started working with AEW they’ve lost Thunder Rosa and Ricky Starks to them and haven’t gotten much of anything in return outside of Leyla Hirsch getting lent out for the NWA Empowerrr show to job to their women’s champion Kamille.  So when you look at it there really isn’t anyone benefiting from any of this except AEW.  But that’s how these things tend to go.  So for the millionth time……..

We told you so.