Federacion Wrestling collapses before it reaches the starting line

Federacion Wrestling’s debut show on Saturday will not occur. The promotion is offering refunds to those who bought tickets through them and suggests those who brought the show through PPV store Coin Access to contact them or file a Paypal claim. (Coin Access redirects people back towards Federacion for refunds in a message that’s been edited to become increasingly hysterical; filling a claim through Paypal is your best bet.)

Both Andrade and Rush simultaneously announced they and their family members were no longer appear on the show on Monday evening due to unspecific logistical issues, though they wished the promotion the best. That seemed a prelude to more names removing themselves on Tuesday – other people booked for the show were already search for replacement work – so Federacion announcing refunds on Monday night spared them further embarrassment. Federacion’s official posture is the show is postponed due to those same undefined logistical concerns and will run at a different undefined date. They would not be offering refunds if they planned to run a show – anyone who dealt with pandemic-related postponements knows they’re more likely just to keep the money in hopes they can run the event much later. The money only gets returned in a no-hope situation. It’s very unlikely a Federacion Wrestling show will ever be run.

Federation seemed doomed from their underwhelming introductory press conference. It exposed the (still never named) owner of the promotion having two assets – a friendship with Rush and money – without any experience in running a wrestling show. The promotion was never developed beyond “friends of Rush and friends of friends of Rush” being brought in to get a payday. The planned card seemed first and foremost about finding spots for people to get a payday, with any effort at making a line that might sell tickets being secondary. The tickets themselves were very expensive for the Mexico City market in an effort to recoup some of the costs – CMLL Aniversario level prices without offering any match of that importance. There was little promotion of the show outside of sporadically updated social media and occasional Rush promos; even if this was a card that might excite people, few people were going to find out about it. There’s word of actual logistical problems – Dr. Landru mentions there was concern about the lack of info on flights, hotels, etc going back to May – but it generally looks like a whole bunch of people getting together to run a wrestling promotion who either had no idea how to actually run a wrestling promotion or weren’t invested in figuring it out.

Federacion Wrestling had some of the biggest names in recent Mexican wrestling history – Rush, Andrade, Fenix, Penta, Bandido, Dragon Lee – and probably didn’t sell 1,000 tickets so far. It was an embarrassing result, one that would’ve framed those wrestlers poorly if they were seen in a barely occupied building on Saturday. I suspect “logistics” is also cover for “the show is a bomb so the promoter wanted to cut our pay”, and they decided to leave. I’m skeptical anyone thought this was going to actually ever work – if it was obvious a disaster from the press conference, it would’ve been obvious to them much sooner – and just hoped to get a payday or two out of it before it fell apart.

What’s next?

• Federacion Wrestling will be added to the long list of Mexican promotions who talking about being a new national group in Mexico and just lost a bunch of money looking foolish. (They did lose less than most by canceling quickly.) Every new promotion will be treated as a real thing by the press and not at all by the fans, who’ve seen this bit way too many times to take any of it seriously.
• Rush will explain that even though he was the central focus of the promotion, his family was all wrestling in it, his faction was the selling point of the show, and he was bringing in a half dozen people from Ring of Honor, he actually had nothing to do with the show and was as shocked as everyone else it didn’t well. He will take no responsibility.
• CMLL will not try to patch things up with Ring of Honor, but there’s always a chance Ring of Honor could reach out to try to fix it if it’s that important to them.
  • ROH seems to have more people than they can put on TV every month, so it’s probably not going to be too big of a concern
• CMLL will definitely use this failure as proof their wrestlers should never leave the company town of Arena Mexico, they’ll all die on their own.
• the next time we’ll see Rush in a Mexico ring is probably during the Omega/Andrade title match at TripleMania
• I can watch the AAA TV show on Saturday in peace