How ROH Became a Dead Brand (what happened?)

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]In March of 2022, Tony Khan said he bought Ring of Honor. The crowd went insane. The IWC was going nuts. I was popping. But four years later, Ring of Honor still has no national TV deal. Its weekly show lives behind a subscription payw wall. Its roster is all underutilized AEW talent. And the Ring of Honor World title hasn't felt very important in a long time. So, the question I want to ask in this video is if AEW is really making the most of its Ring of Honor purchase, or whether Tony Khan just paid millions of dollars for a brand name, a tape library, and good mems. Because to me, Ring of Honor died long before AEW ever entered the picture. So, let's first dissect how the promotion became special, plateaued, and crashed over two decades. But before we get going here, if you have any favorite Ring of Honor memories or matches, throw them in the comments. Would love to see it. The Great Ring of Honor was actually just created because a video distribution company needed content.

[00:00:52]When ECW went bankrupt in 2001 and WWE bought the assets, RF Video, a company that had been selling ECW DVDs, suddenly had a gaping hole in its catalog. Owner Rob Feinstein, hence the RF part, and his colleague Gabolski, who had worked under Paul Heymon in ECW, decided to fill that gap with their own wrestling promotion. They'd run shows, they'd tape them and sell the DVDs. Ring of Honor was born as a content feeder for a mail orderer DVD company. So, kind of like AW being called a t-shirt company when it was founded, Ring of Honor was actually a DVD company. The first show, The Era of Honor Begins, ran February 23rd, 2002 out of the Murphy Recreation Center in Philadelphia. The main event was a triple threat between Loki, Brian Danielson, and Christopher Daniels.

[00:01:40]That's a lot of Daniels. On the undercard, Eddie Guerrero, who had just been released from WWE, wrestled super crazy, amazing. From that first show, we got the code of honor, wrestlers shaking hands before and after matches as a sign of respect. That's one of the small things that made Ring of Honor special from the jump. And if you ask me, this is what American wrestling was missing at the time, a promotion that took the actual wrestling part seriously. What Gabe Seapolski built under that idea over the next six years is legit one of the greatest creative runs in modern American wrestling. He blended American indie talent with guys from Japan and guys from the UK. He launched the careers of Samoa Joe, CM Punk, Brian Danielson, Austin Aries, and Nigel McInness as mainers years before the rest of the world caught on. His booking was logical. The wins, the losses, they both mattered. And the matches did bang.

[00:02:29]Yes, I don't put incredible stock in melter ratings, but the Ring of Honor matches had a ton of five-star work rate performances during a period when US wrestling had basically stopped producing them on a consistent level. By 2005 and 2006, Ring of Honor was expanding. They were running shows in new markets, touring the UK and Japan, and drawing their best live crowds at that point. And in 2008, they set an attendance record at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City for the company. Everything was looking good.

[00:02:56]And then in October 2008, Gabe Sapolski was out. The guy who basically invented what Ring of Honor was was gone. Fired by owner Carrie Silen, who chalked it up to weirdly vague reasons like simple business and changes need to be made sometimes. Legit, I guess. Ring of Honor minus Seapolski, though, is like ECW without Paul Heymon. The identity of the product was inseparable from the creative vision of one guy, and that guy was out of there. Adam Pierce, the now GM of Monday Night Raw, replaced him as a booker. Then Delirious, took over in 2010, which is a position he'd held for over a decade. Just to soapbox about Delirious, his booking lived on delayed pushes. Essentially, with guys like Tyler Black, Kylo Riley, Dalton Castle, and more, Delirious liked a dragged out babyface run that was so long that the star that he was developing would cool off during or eventually just leave for a completely different promotion. Most of them did. And that brings me to another point. Around that time, the Ring of Honor roster pipeline started bleeding out. The whole premise of Ring of Honor was that it was the place where the best unsigned wrestlers went to wrestle. But by the late 2000s, WWE was getting a lot smarter about scouting that same exact talent. Punk left for WWE in 2005. Danielson signed in 2009.

[00:04:13]Joe got snatched up by TNA. The graduation rate from Ring of Honor to WWE became a structural problem for its long-term sustainability. It seemed like every time Ring of Honor built a star, that star became someone else's asset.

[00:04:25]Almost like Ring of Honor was the NXT before NXT. Then in May 2011, Ring of Honor was sold to Sinclair Broadcast Group, a major American TV company that owned dozens of local broadcast stations. When the deal kicked off, it didn't seem like a bad thing. Sinclair had power in its TV presence. Ring of Honor would get a national television slot. It could have gotten the promotion to the next level, maybe. So, why didn't it? The problem with Sinclair was that it was a disjointed mess when it came to Ring of Honor. Quite frankly, Sinclair was a local broadcast TV company. They owned stations in regional markets. Ring of Honor's new show aired on Sinclair's affiliate, so that meant really no prime time on a cable sports network. The show more occupied filler slots at weird times for various channels. So, practically, if you lived in a city where Sinclair didn't own a station, you couldn't watch Ring of Honor on TV. And on top of that, there was creative tension. Sinclair was a broadcast TV company run by executives who are comfortable with football, local news, and syndicated programming. When their executives attended a Ring of Honor show in Chicago and watched the Briscos hang Kenny King with a chain over the top rope, they decided to make Ring of Honor content more TV friendly. Sinclair also geniusly had no real plan for how to make Ring of Honor grow into something larger. The show just looked fine and it just stayed that way. And what followed was about 10 years of Ring of Honor just existing. They ran shows and kept signing good wrestlers. Adam Cole had a good run as champion in the mid-2010s.

[00:05:53]The Briscos were one of the most reliable tag teams in the industry. Jay Lethal's reign as champion from 2015 to 2016 was excellent as well, but the company was owned by an entity that didn't invest in its growth. Talent was still leaving. Cole left for NXT in 2017. The Young Bucks maintained a Ring of Honor relationship for years while experimenting with other promotions.

[00:06:13]Every performer who elevated themselves in Ring of Honor was effectively practicing for the big time somewhere else. By the mid2010s, the indie scene also expanded dramatically. PWG was kicking on the West Coast. Progress and ICW were building in the UK. Lucha Underground had a TV deal and a dozen other promotions were competing for the same pool of uncontracted talent. Ring of Honor wasn't the only place you went if you were the best unsigned wrestler in the country. It was one of many places, including New Japan, including NXT. And something else that I would be remiss to mention is that the G1 supercard that ran Madison Square Garden in 2019 at a joint event between Ring of Honor and New Japan Pro Wrestling was genuinely pretty sick. But it did expose Ring of Honor's lack of star power. If I remember correctly, Ring of Honor at the time was trying to effectively push Matt Tav and the main event of the show was actually Jay White versus Kazuch Okata because I was there actually. I saw the show myself. Co, like to a bunch of wrestling companies, may have been a final blow, though. Ring of Honor, like anyone else, pivoted to empty arena tapings and tried to keep the product going. Meanwhile, Sinclair was in a financial pit at the time. The company had accumulated significant debt throughout years of acquisitions, and the pandemic made their situation worse.

[00:07:27]Now, Ring of Honor wasn't a major line item on Sinclair's balance sheet, but it was also not a priority. And when Sinclair needed to make decisions about what to cut, a wrestling promotion that had never made them significantly profitable was a good option. So in October 2021, Ring of Honor announced it was going on hiatus after Final Battle in December. And then they released the entire roster. The Sinclair era of Ring of Honor was over. Ring of Honor as a functional wrestling entity died in December 2021. Whatever Tony Khan bought 3 months later was the pieces of that.

[00:08:00]So, what exactly did Tony Khan buy in March of 2022? Officially, he bought the Ring of Brand, all intellectual property, and the full video library dating back to the first show in February of 2002. So, essentially, he bought a name with 20 years of stock and tons of footage. Now, just to put that in some perspective, Tony Khan himself later said at Starcast that the gate for the first All-In Wembley show alone was several times the price of the entire company. And he's probably right. A 20-year video library featuring the early careers of CM Punk, Brian Danielson, AJ Styles, Seth Rollins, Kevin Owens, Samoa Joe, and dozens of others does have real value, but Tony Khan didn't buy Ring of Honor as a passive content asset. He bought it as a functioning wrestling promotion that he planned to make relevant again, but there was no real roster and there was no television deal. After the purchase, Ring of Honor was intended to eventually run separately from AEW. Tony Khan mentioned making the video library available to fans as well. Now, this was an exciting time because we could finally get Ring of Honor free from Sinclair from the last 10 or so years.

[00:09:00]That didn't happen, though. 4 years in, Ring of Honor actually is a brand that runs quarterly pay-per-views. It has a weekly show called Ro on Honor Club that airs on a subscription streaming service that I struggle to think a huge amount of people pay for. It's also a series of TV tapings after Collision using loosely used guys from the AW roster. and it's a title scene that functions as a layer under AEW's main championship picture.

[00:09:25]It's kind of a developmental, although it hasn't been called one outright yet.

[00:09:29]When AW renewed its Warner Brothers Discovery deal in late 2024 for $555 million over 3 years, Ring of Honor wasn't part of that deal. Tony Khan even previously floated the idea of rebranding it as AEW Ring of Honor for media deal purposes. That never happened either. Ring of Honor remains on Honor Club where WrestleNomics described it as functioning with quote little sign of broader strategic purpose beyond a few thousand streaming subscribers and quarterly pay-per-views. Ring of Honor has though received a few formal TV deal offers, but Tony Khan turned them all down, saying that he wants rights fees to reflect the brand's value and he won't accept something that underells it relative to AW's deal. And I can understand that if Ring of Honor had any roster or identity of its own anymore, which it kind of doesn't. But the reality is that the more Ring of Honor weights on something like that, the less exposure it's going to get and the less people are going to care over time. And there hasn't been much in the way of expanding the brand, unless you count, you know, giving Chris Jericho the belt for a while, putting him on Dynamite Weekly, calling him the oo, and not getting a TV deal out of it. So, at the nuts and bolts, was the video library alone worth buying Ring of Honor for?

[00:10:35]Ring of Honor's tape library is 20 years of professional wrestling history, featuring some of the most important performers of the modern era. That content is valuable and I'm sure WWE would have scooped it up if not for AEW.

[00:10:48]Most Ring of Honor content is available on Honor Club, but Honor Club subscriber base again is smaller and there hasn't been a major push to make the archival content destination viewing for people.

[00:10:59]The purchase though was not a mistake in my opinion, but the execution has been lacking because buying a dead brand isn't enough to get people to watch it.

[00:11:07]It has to get back some of that horsepower and earn some of that momentum that it once had. So, can Ring of Honor have another crack at being a top promotion today? I think top promotion is a stretch, big stretch, but I do genuinely believe it could do much better than it has been with the right strategy. First, it needs TV. It needs a cable or streaming deal that puts Ring of Honor content in front of people who aren't already looking for it. Honor Club exists for fans of the product. TV or streaming, and marketing is how you build a new brand. A wrestling brand that isn't on TV or widely available with marketing dollars going into it is one whose value declines. If nobody knows about it, how are they going to get interested? Second, it needs to separate itself from AW. Right now, Ring of Honor is a B show. The roster is kind of the same. The production is lower budget. The crowd is small. There is no clear reason why someone who watches AW Dynamite and Collision also needs to watch Ring of Honor because Ring of Honor isn't offering anything super different. There's got to be some rebuilding of the Ring of Honor brand with some of the best wrestlers in the world exclusive to its programming. I mean, that's how the original Ring of Honor created its audience. You watched because Brian Danielson was there and he was cool and a great wrestler and he was Ring of Honor Champion and you cared about Brian Danielson and the Ring of Honor Championship specifically. So, all that to say, Ring of Honor was one of the most important wrestling promotions of the 21st century. What Gabe Spolski did between 2002 and 2008 genuinely changed how a generation of fans and performers thought about professional wrestling. The matches from that era are still great. The stars it created changed the world of pro wrestling. But the promotion that Tony Khan purchased in March of 2022 was the pieces of that.

[00:12:48]It was what was left of the 10 years of Sinclair's indifference and a pandemic that deleted what was left. The roster was gone. The audience moved on. The brand identity was watered down. And I'll say this, this is a big topic on the internet. AW did not kill Ring of Honor. Sinclair didn't kill Ring of Honor. Ring of Honor died slowly after it reached its peak from when it lost.

[00:13:08]Seapolski through the years of watching its best talent leave for anywhere else and through the pandemic. That's what I think. As a functioning independent wrestling promotion with its own identity and its own audience, Ring of Honor is still to me kind of dead. What exists right now is a brand name attached to a secondary operation that isn't doing much to earn its keep. I don't think the buy itself was a mistake, but four years in the execution hasn't been up to snuff with what we had all hoped or expected. So, do you think Ring of Honor has a future under Tony Khan and I'm just being too hard on it?

[00:13:38]If so, let me know in the comments.

[00:13:40]Otherwise, hope you had a great time.

[00:13:42]Hope you had fun. Hope you learned something. And also,