Impact Wrestling has been making some huge waves in professional wrestling lately as they’ve teamed up with AEW and New Japan Pro Wrestling (NJPW) to start recreating a new territory system.
One of the benefits to this is it allows many that may not watch NJPW to see some of their stars like Juice Robinson, David Finley, and El Phantasmo in action when we may not have otherwise.
This isn’t something new as Impact has worked with other promotions before, but mainly outside of the United States.
What makes their recent history unique is their teaming with AEW to do cross promotions. It’s brought more eyes onto Impact Wrestling and has helped make history with a dual champion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sltxmjZQKWU&t=4s
Spreading the wealth
That’s not something we’ve seen between United States promotions in a long time, and a lot of the thanks has to go to Tony Kahn and AEW since they started doing this with the NWA.
But Impact took it a step further and put their tag titles on FinJuice from NJPW, and then the Impact World Championship on Kenny Omega from AEW.
This weekend at Under Siege, El Phantasmo from NJPW will challenge Josh Alexander for the X-Division Championship, meaning the company could allow their three top titles to leave for a time.
These are what really makes a difference as it’s rare a company in the United States would put their own top titles on someone that’s not exclusively with them.
The old NWA relied on the governors to choose their champion and whoever that was defended the title in all of the NWA’s affiliated territories.
By allowing others in different companies to carry their titles to their home promotions, it gets eyes on their titles and gets people talking.
It’s a risky gamble, but so far it looks like it’s been working to lift Impact’s ratings.
More to come
The downside is it looks mainly one-sided in some ways as AEW rarely mentions them and aside from the Good Brothers and Don Callis, no one’s appeared on AEW Dynamite.
This doesn’t mean it won’t happen, but at the moment this is helping all three companies increase their viewers and it’s a win-win-win.
It’ll be interesting to see how long this will last, but recent news came out that Impact may be working with another company in the near future and that will only help lift the visibility of everyone involved.
What do you think about Impact Wrestling creating a new territory coalition? Will it continue helping them and everyone involved?
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