The Rise & Fall Of TNA | Wrestling Timelines

For a few, cruel moments, TNA looked big on January 15, 2026: the night of the heavily publicised debut on AMC. 

The much-maligned promotion was always canny at shooting a modest crowd, and the scale of this thing looked very impressive. AJ Styles opened the show, to a huge pop, against a backdrop of adoring, vocal fans. On loan from WWE - whose partnership with TNA projected a veneer of big station credibility - a bored-looking Styles very abruptly said that it was time to get on with the wrestling. TNA did not get on with the wrestling. TNA instead really, truly TNA’d it. 

The undercard matches ranged from utterly mediocre (Elijah and the Hardys Vs. Mustafa Ali, Jason Hotch and John Skyler) to absolutely woeful (the Elegance Brand Vs. the Iinspiration). Perez Hilton, a Gilgamesh-ancient celebrity, received more TV time than half of the roster. About 60% of the show seemed to take place backstage. 

TNA was meant to supplant AEW as the #2 promotion in the United States, and with the AMC deal, supposedly had an exceptional chance of doing so. Eric Bischoff said this. Various members of the WWE-friendly media said this. Chris Jericho said that Bound For Glory 2025 looked like WrestleMania, even though WrestleMania has not emanated from an arena since 2006. Matt Hardy would not stop talking about this, although you’d struggle to get a quote from him now. In the most bruising of ironies, the main event was the one vaguely praised aspect of a show so bad that even Bischoff had the sense to drop his agenda. And yet, Mike Santana Vs. Frankie Kazarian was not too dissimilar to the obvious “good match” that Matt Hardy was tired of seeing. And it would have only been the fourth best thing on any given Dynamite. 

TNA, a company many believed to be cursed by ineptitude irrespective of who owns it or even what it is called, had one job. One. The promotion had to pretend that they had made it big. This perception was annihilated very early when the director was forced to cut to a slew of very minor celebrities positioned in front of an empty stand. This was the moment in which the Wizard of Oz grift was exposed. TNA might have struck up a relationship with WWE, but at its core, it was a humbug of an operation. Who was it for? 

TNA, to its cost, was never once able to answer that question, even during its rise…

In the March 11, 2002 issue of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Dave Meltzer covers the dismal state of U.S. wrestling in the shadow of the WWF’s monopoly. He wades through the laughable attempts to create an alternative to the market leader: doomed outfits established by purveyors of deeply ugly hardcore pornography; promotions that operate as desperate, short-term cash-grabs; outfits that only pretend to exist to bilk naive investors out of money. There is some optimism, because Meltzer writes the following:

“There is one other product quietly starting up in the background. There have apparently been negotiations between Jerry Jarrett and InDemand PPV. The idea seems to be based around the idea of doing weekly PPV events, in primetime, most likely on Wednesday nights, at $9.95 a pop.” 

Meltzer exercises caution over the development, citing the fatal lack of television. The pro wrestling landscape in the United States is shattered. The shuttering of WCW in 2001, and the declining WWF of 2002, hardly positions pro wrestling as a viable option for a TV industry that, pre-streaming, is very far from dead. The industry and the advertising industry that sustains it had a very dim view of wrestling to begin with. Advertisers largely believe that the average pro wrestling fan is uneducated and poor. Why sell to those who can’t buy? This stigma undermined pro wrestling’s commercial potential even during the boom. 

Jarrett however is a pro wrestling genius, the man who drafted the blueprint for weekly episodic television in his heyday as the mastermind behind the Memphis territory. He’s old and out of touch, but this might prove to be a feature, not a bug, in a schlock-polluted landscape in dire need of a back-to-basics approach. He and son Jeff are convinced to give this a try at the urging of Bob Ryder: former WCW employee and architect of the ‘Internet Wrestling Community’. 

Ryder becomes the first and, until his death in November 2020, longest-serving TNA employee. 

Under the banner of Jarrett Sports Entertainment and “presented” by the old governing body of the industry in the U.S., NWA:TNA is soon to be born.