The Tennessean newspaper is reporting that Impact Wrestling will be officially dead this coming Sunday as Anthem Sports and Entertainment will rebrand the company to Global Force Wrestling, the company that Jeff Jarrett founded after he left TNA.
Earlier this week, Anthem announced that it has acquired Global Force Wrestling from Jeff Jarrett, paving the way for the complete rebrand.
“We’re a global brand,” Jarrett said of the rebranding. “We have partnerships in Mexico, Japan, other places. Collectively coming together, we’ve combined forces and basically the rebrand final touches happen on Sunday at Slammiversary.”
The company will still be headquartered in Nashville, at the Skyway Studios building where all the pre and post production work is handled.
Ed Nordholm of Anthem said that there were two reasons behind the rebrand: the double meaning of the TNA acronym and the fact that their name was tainted by negative media coverage over the years.
“When Anthem got involved we saw a rare opportunity to get involved with an asset that already had global distribution,” Nordholm said. “It’s a 3,500-hour library, broadcast in 120 countries, existing distribution contracts in India, Africa and now the United Kingdom. The timeline to take a ground zero promotion to that kind of penetration was 15 years. The work now is to fix some things.”
Nordholm added, “One part of our international strategy is not just to take WWE-style ‘Impact’ and export it to other countries, but as well to more deeply penetrate those international markets in association with promotions that are centric to those markets. The international promotions want to tap into our expertise to boost those shows, but also to in turn boost the GFW content.”
Jeff Jarrett admitted that the name had two kinds of legacies. One for successfully developing future stars and one for negative headlines surrounding the business they ran.
“When you look back on history, 2005 to 2015, the stars of today were created right under our watch – A.J. Styles, Samoa Joe and Bobby Roode, arguably the top freshest stars in the world today. I’m excited for this roster now. I’m excited to show the next A.J. Styles to the world.”
