10 Biggest Wrestling Controversies Of 2016

3. BROKEN Matt Hardy

Matt Hardy is one of wrestling's quiet revolutionaries, within WWE and, more impressively, outside of it.

It must be tempting, for an ex-WWE performer, to simply trade on the name value they cultivated on national television. It's easy money. To Hardy's credit, however, he has consistently reinvented himself. When he arrived in ROH, he was summarily rejected by fans who rather myopically perceived him as an unfashionable castoff. The enterprising Hardy surfed the zeitgeist and produced a hilarious, retaliatory anti-bullying video to channel and intensify their ire.

Hardy's latest reincarnation saw him become BROKEN - into a bizarrely-accented vessel possessed by the "seven deities". The character was the most controversial of 2016. Was he expanding an increasingly homogenised and stale wrestling narrative, or destroying the business outright?

It started inauspiciously. The Final Deletion hype was met with widespread derision. In retrospect, it was just bad soap opera - not quite ridiculous enough to convey that tongue was planted firmly in cheek. Hardy soon corrected that error by presenting the most ludicrous matches and promos this side of DDT.

Speaking personally, I would hate to see this become the norm, but Hardy's BROKEN brilliance is inimitable. There is no danger of that.