It appears that Nashville-based Impact Wrestling (formerly TNA Wrestling) will be officially rebranding as Global Force Wrestling effective this Sunday at Slammiversary.
Nate Rau of The Tennessean is featuring an article with comments from Jeff Jarrett and Ed Nordholm where it is made clear that an official rebranding will take place just days after it was announced that Anthem and Impact had acquired GFW.
Jeff Jarrett will continue his creative role with the company, while the weekly Pop TV show will continue to use the Impact Wrestling name. The move was said to be in large part to distance the new Anthem-owned regime from the issues under the old TNA banner that, as described in the article, “endured a turnstile of cable television partners and garnered negative headlines for unpaid bills, unpaid talent and state tax liens.”
This move comes just days before the company celebrates its 15th anniversary with the Slammiversary PPV this Sunday in Orlando, Florida at Universal Studios. The promotion was originally founded back in June of 2002 under Jeff and Jerry Jarrett under the NWA-TNA (Total Nonstop Action) name. It would later undergo an attempt at rebranding as “Impact Wrestling” in 2011 in the latter part of its tenure on Spike TV from 2005-2014. The show would then shift to Destination America in 2015 and then make the jump to Pop TV one year later in 2016, a deal that reportedly expires at the end of 2017.
The article noted that the company views Slammiversary as a “relaunch” of sorts, with Jarrett further elaborating on the pending changes.
“We’re a global brand. 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.”
Anthem’s Ed Nordholm also talked about the continued growth and first 100 days of the new regime under Jarrett and other wrestling minds.
“We needed a wrestling guy. 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 (wrestling) 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. When Anthem got involved we saw a rare opportunity to get involved with an asset that already had global distribution. It’s a 3,500-hour library, broadcast in 120 countries, existing distribution contracts in India, Africa and now the United Kingdom.”