More Details On TNA Not Paying Talent, Their Relationship With Discovery

There continues to be a lot of turmoil behind the scenes in TNA. Morale hit a real low last week in light of many wrestlers and employees being way behind on getting paid.

TNA’s top stars have contracts where they’re supposed to be paid a salary on the first of every month, with the other talent working on per-show deals. As of last week, several of TNA’s biggest names were behind on pay and it’s now becoming a major issue. Some of the wrestlers who are scheduled to be paid monthly were over 30 days behind on pay while the others were even more in arrears.

Earlier this week, Matt Hardy tweeted photos showing that he received 5 checks from TNA at once. While it was probably done as a sincere gesture to show that TNA talent is in fact being paid, the subtext is that Hardy was one of the many performers who was owed significant money by the company.

Taz announced this week that he has parted way with TNA and thanked the company for the years of employment. In reality, Taz was way behind on pay and actually refused to fly to Nashville earlier this month to do post-production commentary because of the situation.

TNA recently moved their payroll office from Nashville to Dallas (where Panda Energy is located), which some people used as a possible excuse as to the payment ‘confusion.’ This argument really doesn’t hold up, since TNA has been sending checks out of Dallas for quite some time.

Regarding TNA’s relationship with Destination America, Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter says “the honeymoon is pretty much over.” Discovery signed TNA as an experiment, hoping to bolster Destination America’s lineup. While TNA is by far the highest rated show in the history of the network, Discovery is very disappointed with TNA’s inability to generate ad revenue. The commercials that air during Impact Wrestling speak for themselves.

The network was expecting a much larger portion of the Spike TV audience to find Impact’s new home. Destination America is available in 61.7% of the homes that Spike TV is, yet the first-run episodes of Impact are drawing 30.2% the viewership that Impact was doing last year. Even factoring in the Impact replay, the show is still doing less than half the viewers it was doing on Spike TV in early 2014.

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