Professional wrestling legend and WWE Hall of Famer Jeff Jarrett who is also a four times WCW World Heavyweight champion recently talked about the similarities between the All Elite Wrestling and Prime TNA Wrestling.
TNA Wrestling was the biggest competitor of WWE throughout 2010s. The promotion was founded back in 2002 and from the very first day the promotion was meant to compete with WWE. After the death of WCW in 2001, die hard fans of the promotion was looking for an alternative. Just after one year, TNA came out as that alternative. Most of the wrestlers and the staff of the promotion was from WCW. It was more like WCW resurrected by a new name.
Jeff Jarrett Discusses The Similarities Between TNA And AEW
But when the promotion started in 2002, they focused more on promoting new stars such as AJ Styles, Samoa Joe and Ron “The Truth” Killings. Slowly, they started to bring bigger names from other promotions and the Indies. Some of the biggest names of WCW such as Sting and Kevin Nash. But the biggest signing they made had to be the Olympic Gold Medallist Kurt Angle.
But ultimately TNA failed to compete with WWE unlike AEW, the promotion that is in existence for only two years but already showing more prospects than WWE. Right now it is better than WWE in every aspect.
It is producing better matches, better shows, in fact better storylines. WWE is arguably going through their worst creative time. They are failing to book most of the wrestlers and even titles. So of course AEW became more successful in a very small amount of time than TNA.
Jeff Jarrett who is also a four times WCW World Heavyweight champion recently spoke to Cageside Seats where he talked about the similarities between the All Elite Wrestling and Prime TNA Wrestling. He said;
“The natural, low-hanging fruit. the most simplistic is the alternative, Jarrett says. “The similarity is that the alternative, at the very end of the day, I truly believe — and I think Vince McMahon would agree with this — it’s the best for business to always have an alternative. It’s just what makes business go around.
“If you’re the only game in town, you’re not number one because there isn’t a number two. The timing when TNA started, coming off the Attitude Era, and the timing when AEW started are radically different worlds. Pre social media world coming off the Attitude Era. When TBS and TNT cancelled wrestling, I couldn’t even get a phone call from a network.
“Fast-forward, the big rights fees with NBC and Fox and the Peacock situation and Sony around the world in India and all the different markets — it’s a completely different playing field of 2002 and 2019 in the launch period. The climate is completely different. The television ratings are completely different.
“We started on a Saturday night on Spike TV in ‘05 or ‘06. Not prime, off prime. 11 eastern we were getting 700,000 or 800,000 viewers. On a Saturday night at late prime. The numbers were different. It was a pre-streaming world, a pre-social media world. When you factor in all that, it’s a completely different media market.”