After a popular rebranding that plays on the nostalgia center of fans’ brains and one of its most successful shows in some time at Hard to Kill, TNA Wrestling is poised to do big things in 2024 — but it will do them without one of the people most credited for leading the promotion back from some of its lowest times.
In a move that shocked the wrestling world, TNA announced today that it had terminated the contract of president Scott D’Amore, effective immediately. The new president is Anthony Cicione, president of the Entertainment Group of Anthem Sports & Entertainment, TNA’s parent company.
Here are the relevant parts of TNA’s official statement:
The move aims to further integrate TNA Wrestling into Anthem’s Entertainment Group, of which Cicione is the President, leveraging the entire Company’s resources to add more value in areas including production, distribution, marketing, viewership, customer acquisition, digital revenue streams, ad sales and sponsorships, digital tech operations, and more.
Cicione replaces Scott D’Amore, whose contract with Anthem has been terminated. D’Amore has been a part of TNA since 2003. He held many key leadership positions and played a vital role in the growth of the company leading to its strong industry reputation today, including the successful return of the TNA Wrestling brand in 2024. Anthem thanks him for the commitment he brought to the business, the talent, and the people who work outside the ring.
That undersells D’Amore’s status as someone synonymous with Impact/TNA over the past two decades. Many wrestlers and industry observers credit his leadership as a key factor in the promotion clawing its way back from near extinction in 2017, the same year Anthem took over.
The obvious assumption is that there’s more to the story, but if there is, some of the most well-connected reporters in the business haven’t unearthed it yet. Mike Johnson of PWInsider didn’t turn up any belief among his sources that D’Amore was fired for cause.
No one (who we’ve spoken with) seems to know any specific answer, not even to the point where they are privately voicing it in confidence. This literally could be exactly what was stated, that it was just a corporate restructuring that left D’Amore lost at sea in the corporate game of musical chairs.
Same for Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful Select (subscription required), except for a vague feeling that Anthem wanted TNA more integrated within everything else it’s doing.
One talent said they believed Anthem wanted the brand to be more closely associated with them as opposed to D’Amore, and when we asked another about that they said ‘I can see that, but he saved TNA.’
The reality is that big companies sometimes (often?) don’t care about morale when they feel a move is the right one for business reasons, but there’s little question that the last few months have now officially turned into a roller coaster ride for TNA talent, from the highs of the rebranding to today’s confusing lows.
How this affects the TNA product going forward remains to be seen. In the meantime, there are plenty of questions and not a whole lot of answers, a status quo that might persist until someone involved decides to say more.
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