Major Issues at TNA House Show

[Troy]

This is pathetic from TNA, they are a big company and they should be able to organise simple things like licenses for wrestlers which all wrestling promotions know they need. I like how they tried to place the place on the Missouri Athletic Commission rather than accept responsibility themselves. This company needs to actually start organising things and start taking notes. They allow contracts to expire and now they forget to organise licenses for their wrestlers. Terrible management.

 

[Deezy]

How can anybody call TNA a big company, 500 PEOPLE FOR A HOUSE SHOW!!! That's bush league and so is their management.

LOLTNA

Mama Carter is going to start firing more people again.

 

[Troy]

They are a big company in wrestling. Obviously compared to companies like Coke and BP they are small but in the wrestling world they are the second biggest. They have tv clearance in dozens of countries around the world, they are on a major network in the US, they have PPV distribution. They are big when you compare them to the other wrestling companies around the world.

It is pretty poor that they only drew 500 to a house show but look at who they had booked for the show. Even if the guys that didn't have licenses were cleared to wrestle it was a pretty weak line up. If they actually sent their top wrestlers to each house show then they would be able to draw a lot more.

 

[Deezy]

TNA is the RC cola of wrestling while everyone else is no-name brands. That company is looking like it is flatlining, Thy can't keep their ratings over a 1.0, they don't draw a houseshows, they spend over 60 grand at TV tapings (no joke), nobody buys their PPVs. And their Spike deal ends in 2014 if Spike itself isn't rebranded by Viacom.

I can loltna until I'm blue in tha face, but then what happens after it is done? 50 wrestlers out of a job, not to mention all the production crew, the producers, the agents, the creative team. TNA is fucked, too bad Jarrett let a mark buy his company from him and run it into the ground.

Not a big company, New Japan does better financial numbers these days, they should be the default number 2.

 

[Troy]

Even though they aren't making profit they are still a big company in wrestling when you look at their revenues. All the international tv deals that they have would be bringing in a large amount of money and through the sponsorhip and merchandising deals that they have they would be bringing in plenty of money each year. They just don't know how to properly budget and spend the money so that they make a profit each year.

New Japan can't really be considered number 2 because they don't have that worldwide distribution. They may be large in Japan, but still far off the heights they reached in the 90's but at the moment I still don't think that they are number 2 worldwide. Same goes for AAA in Mexico, they are large in one country but don't have the impact worldwide that they once had.

Also with the tv tapings I thought that TNA were spending $600k per taping?

 

[Deezy]

New Japan iPPVs do better buyrates than TNAs actual PPVs and unlike ROH and the last AAA show, don't have problems with their servers crashing. It also isn't the same New Japan as it was in the 90s, but they are getting back to prominence, even though most peopl on the boards wouldn't know that Japans wrestling stopped being hot after 02.

Unlike TNA, who bleeds cash left and right and can't even find a band aid. If TNA is #2, then the state of indy wrestling isn't even in the toilet, it's in the sewers living with Splinter.

Oh and I left out an extra 0. TNA can save alot of money eliminating pyro and most of the set, keep the shit simple, and have the wrestlers and refs set up the ring and stuff, you don't need to hire people to set the ring and cameras up and for fuck sakes, stay out of big arenas, you can't fill it so why bother?

 

[Troy]

What numbers are the New Japan buyrates doing? I suppose a good comparison between New Japan and TNA right now would be the fact that New Japan was sold for around $6 million last year to a new owner, would TNA be worth the same or less?

Just because a company is terribly managed and can't figure out a basic budget doesn't mean that it isn't a big company. It is a big company that is managed by morons. Indy wrestling is weak right now and has been in trouble for a long time. There isn't the interest there anymore, as they say when the guy on top is doing weaker business (AKA WWE) it filters down to the rest of the business.

TNA should book 2-3k seat arenas and pack the place rather than booking 10k seat arenas and barely filling half of it. The bonus of selling out an arena is they can charge more per head since the demand is there so instead of averaging $20 per head they can push it up to $30 and even higher. I agree that it isn't hard to cut costs and your ideas are all sensible, unfortunately TNA don't like sensible ideas.

 

[Cena's Jeans Shorts]

Regarding how crazy it is to be a wrestler, yet not have a wrestling license. I'm pretty sure you're dealing with every state's individual athletic, boxing, or wrestling commissions for a license. Government bureaucracies are rarely efficient or easy. That was part of the main reason the WWF tried to move towards "sports entertainment" back when Vince took over, isn't it? Get away from pretending it's an actual sport, forget the work, and you can argue you can't be treated like boxers because you aren't actually competing in a sport.

I doubt TNA has a legal team to foresee or work on these things. Maybe some of the wrestlers forgot, maybe some of them were in the process of applying but got the run-around. Who knows.

There was a story in one of the dirtsheets a few years ago, they directly quoted some of the regulations from one state's athletic commissions rules for professional wrestling. Damn if they didn't make rules like they were either marks or desperate to be in on the work. It had rules ranging from limiting the number of minutes per match, prohibiting wrestlers from taking the match out into the audience and other silly things of the sort.

In the end, as independent contractors, it's the wrestlers' responsibility. Most promoters, with the exception of the WWE, probably expected the wrestlers to take care of their own working visas, travel documents, etc. But I could also easily believe there's some mark athletic commissioner out there that thinks he's doing his job by being difficult and not granting a license to some rassler.

 

[Troy]

If the company books a wrestler for a certain state then they should ensure that that wrestler is cleared to wrestle in that state. It is something that any promotion should know, they have these wrestlers signed to contracts and should know the limitations that come with them. If they find out that a certain wrestler isn't covered then they should remind them to get clearance. In a company as large as TNA they should know something as basic as whether a wrestler is legally allowed to wrestle in a state or not.

 

[John McHenry]

LMFAO in a nice turn of events the person responsible for the licensing of TNA talent was none other than Bruce Prichard who they fired a week or two back.

 

[Troy]

Well you can see why they fired him if he can't organise simple things like this. Might have been smart to ask him before they fired him if everything was set for the upcoming house shows.