TNA's 10 Most Costly Mistakes

1. Dismantling The Knockouts

Just going purely by numbers, perhaps TNA’s biggest mistake is when they gave up on their female talent.

Starting in 2007, the women in the company were finally given a championship to feud over with the introduction to the Knockouts belt.

Unlike WWE, TNA was going to push their women athletes as real competitors, not just as eye candy. Under the guidance of Dutch Mantell, their segments soon became the most watched on the show.

That was it. That was the thing TNA was searching for all along. They had something that WWE did not have that fans could tune in to watch. It gave them an identity. Gail Kim, Awesome Kong, Velvet Sky, Angelina Love, ODB and others were drawing the highest ratings. More fans watched them than Kurt Angle, Booker T, Kevin Nash, Sting and all the former WCW and WWE main event players.

To make things even better from a business perspective, is that the women wrestlers cost a fraction of what the men did. Sting was rumored to have made $500,0000 for years in TNA to only wrestle a handful of televised matches a year. It was simple. Take that money, and invest it in a bunch of talented women to long-term deals. It was so amazingly, and obviously simple. And of course, TNA f***ed it up.

They offered Kim and Kong insultingly low deals, so they left. Dutch Mantell was then ousted from power, and more big money deals were then offered to Hogan, Bischoff, Mr. Anderson, Rob Van Dam and other high priced men.

Millions of dollars were thrown away to sign those former Monday Night War veterans when they had absolute proof that the Knockouts were bringing in a bigger audience. It was an insane course of action that TNA chose, and it has haunted them ever since.