Welcome once again to Tybo’s Talks! I am Tybo, and I’m sure by now you know that I am the ‘Five Star General’ of this operation we call SLTD Wrestling.
I am fully aware that the title of this post is a very bold statement, but bare with me it will make sense in the end.
There has been a lot of talking lately that TNA Wrestling could be no more in the next few months, this isn’t really news as this seems to be happening every week, but it got me thinking. What if TNA completely changed its set up and became a British Promotion, arguably the biggest British Promotion.
There is no denying that TNA has a huge following in the UK. Why wouldn’t they, regardless of your feeling towards the product TNA has been very clever with its distribution of its product in the UK. If you are unaware TNA is televised on a channel called ‘Challenge TV’, now Challenge isn’t the biggest and its isn’t the best TV channel in the UK, but UK residents can get this channel on ‘Freeview’ which basically means that if you have a TV that isn’t 10 years old or you have a ‘Freeview’ box you can watch TNA every week for free!
Yes that’s free! not £9.99. Free! Its like being a new subscriber every month. This also includes all of TNA’s PPV’s (when they have them), all of TNA’s One Night Only’s and also TNA’s British Boot Camp.
Now to me this is a genius move on TNA’s part, because in the UK if you want to watch WWE (legally) you have to have a Sky or Virgin subscription and the sports package on top of that, so you are looking at upwards of £60 a month to watch WWE, and that’s with out all the PPV’s that are on Sky Box Office that are around the £20 mark.
Now, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that if you are a wrestling fan and you cant afford nearly £100 a month for WWE you are going to be watching TNA. Or at the very least checking it out every once in a while. This probably has a lot to do with TNA breaking their attendance records almost every time they come over to the UK.
As a collective SLTD Radio has joked in the past about the possibility of TNA moving to the UK, but would it really be such a bad idea?
TNA have been the number two wrestling company for a long time now, your thoughts on the product and if you like ROH, Lucha Underground, or anywhere else really doesn’t matter. None of these companies have the global following and global TV deals TNA does. Its a fact! But what if they stopped being the number two company in the world and became the number one company in the UK?
Personally, I think this is a very achievable goal, Although there are many UK based promotions none of them stand out as number one. This has a lot to do with them only really being able to make a regional footprint and not a national one. This is not taking away from any UK promotion but the money involved in touring a product must be a lot! and to do this without a TV deal to promote the product, and pay some of the costs, it must be near impossible otherwise someone would of done it by now?
TNA already have a very strong UK audience, they already have a weekly TV spot on a Freeview channel, they already have the backing of major companies and have the funds behind them to do something big in the UK. To me this is an absolute no brainer, TNA in the US is clearly not doing what they want it to do as they are seemingly always fighting the end of the company. Even if half the rumors about TNA are not true, to hear anything like that is not good for a company.
If TNA came to the UK and built a promotion they could revolutionise the UK scene. The way I see British wrestling at the minute is a lot like the territories on the US before Vince McMahon came along. There are some hugely talented British wrestlers on the scene right now and to give them and British wrestling as a whole the spotlight it deserves would be an amazing thing and a long time coming.
TNA have already shown that they are interested in British talent with having two seasons of ‘British Boot Camp’ and touring the UK looking for wrestlers for that show. Just imagine the possibility of having TNA touring the UK every week with a predominantly British cast of wrestlers, as a wrestling fan I know I would be watching every week and when TNA UK came to my town I would be getting tickets.
The more I write about this the more sense it would make, I personally think TNA could make more, and spend less money touring the UK than they could at the minute in the US. I may be completely wrong about this, and would love the insight of a British Wrestling promoter to see what they think about the idea of having Challenge TV show a ‘TNA UK’ style show.
Let me know what you think below, if you live in the UK would you want to see a ‘TNA UK’ weekly show? would you buy tickets?
Owner and operator of www.SLTDWrestling.com, host of SLTDRadio at www.SLTDRadio.co.uk and on Spreaker
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