10 Mistakes WWE Never Recovered From

2. The Invasion

Steve Austin, Vince McMahon, WrestleMania 17
WWE.com

It should have been the greatest feud in pro wrestling history. When Vince McMahon purchased WCW, it came with the potential for a once-in-a-lifetime dream story, where the combined forces of WCW and ECW would come together to put WWE into the ground. The matches that fans had dreamt of for years would finally come to fruition. Stone Cold vs. Hulk Hogan? The Rock vs. Kevin Nash? Kurt Angle vs. Goldberg? Finally!

Instead, WWE turned the Invasion into a McMahon-fest, a pathetic humiliation that showed fans just how creatively bankrupt the company was. The winner-take-all match at Survivor Series should have been a best of the best from all companies, but a cursory glance at the competitors is telling. 10 combatants, only two of whom weren’t WWE guys. Go figure.

Of course, the whole story wasn’t helped by WCW being a spluttering corpse at that time. Nobody in their right mind was going to care about Jeff Jarrett, Hugh Morrus and Shawn Stasiak, but a bit of effort would have been nice. The Invasion should have set WWE up for years, but instead, it was a creative mistake from which the company never really recovered.

Contributor
Contributor

Born in the middle of Wales in the middle of the 1980's, John can't quite remember when he started watching wrestling but he has a terrible feeling that Dino Bravo was involved. Now living in Prague, John spends most of his time trying to work out how Tomohiro Ishii still stands upright. His favourite wrestler of all time is Dean Malenko, but really it is Repo Man. He is the author of 'An Illustrated History of Slavic Misery', the best book about the Slavic people that you haven't yet read. You can get that and others from www.poshlostbooks.com.