Impact Wrestling No More, Rebrands as Global Force Wrestling

– After years of speculation and hanging on by a thread, Impact Wrestling is dead. Kind of. The Tenneseean reports that the company is killing off the Impact Wrestling name and is rebranding to Global Force Wrestling. Impact officially bought the rights to GFW earlier in the week now that GFW founder Jeff Jarrett had come back to power in Impact and the plan is to use the GFW name going forward.

GFW’s weekly PopTV television show will continue to be called “Impact,” the last legacy of a company that began as TNA in 2002 under Jeff and Jerry Jarrett. Anthem Sports remains the owner of the company and the offices for the company will remain in Nashville, Tennesee.

“We’re a global brand,” Jarrett told the site regarding the decision to rebrand. “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.'”

President Ed Nordholm said the decision to rebrand was due to the “turnoff” that the TNA name caused in terms of marketing partners due to the sexual connotations, and that the name was damaged due to all of the negative media coverage.

Jarrett and Nordholm said that the plan is to continue to expand internationally, with broadcast and streaming deals in the work in both India and the UK. All of this happens ahead of Slammiversary this weekend. Nordholm noted that the recent tour to India was huge for the company, noting, “In the aftermath, we had more visitors to our YouTube visitors from India than from the United States.”

Nordholm added that the company is developing an on-demand streaming service, similar to the WWE Network, in order to monetize their library. An app has already launched with part of the library available. “The objective is to make that our own video on-demand hub,” Nordholm said.

“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.”