Billy Corgan Confirms WWE Turned Down Buying the NWA Before He Purchased It

Billy Corgan’s time as the owner of the National Wrestling Alliance has seen the once-dominant organization finally regain recognition in the current pro wrestling landscape. Corgan was recently on the Talk Is Jericho podcast where he described how the company managed to stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic without operating shows and why he wanted to return to hosting weekly pro wrestling in a studio format for so long. He also described the dire situation the NWA was in before he purchased the company, confirming that the WWE turned down buying it under the belief that it had no value.

“I’m proud to carry the mantle of the business in this way. It’s a very specific thing, and of course, the business is far different than it was in the heyday of the NWA,” Corgan said (h/t Wrestling Inc.). “There’s no pretend there. When I bought the NWA and that was coming out of the whole situation with TNA and the debacle and lawsuits, and there was a lot of kind of public acrimony there.

“And then I purchased NWA. Crazily enough, it was owned by one person. It was so devalued. He tried to sell it to everybody. Nobody wanted it, as far as I know. He certainly offered it to WWE. They thought it was so worthless that they didn’t even just buy it just to take it off the market,” he continued. “Then when I bought it, Jim Cornette and other people, and I loved Jim. ‘What the hell did he buy? He might as well have bought air. He bought three worthless letters.’ A lot of that type of stuff and certainly I sat around at one point and thought, ‘Well, if I started, Billy Corgan Wrestling or SP Wrestling’, and I thought, no, I want the history. I’ll take that history. I’ll take that on. I like the challenge of that.”

Corgan also talked about how much the wrestling business has changed even in the four years since he made his big purchase. He credited a lot of that change to the launch of All Elite Wrestling in 2019.

“I think it’s all there, and look, what you guys are doing with AEW, the business is moving in this completely new direction, you guys are opening up new vistas that wouldn’t have been there a few years ago,” Corgan said. “Before AEW I would go in and have meetings in Hollywood, and they’d be like, ‘No one cares about wrestling, no one’s gonna pay for it. If it’s not WWE, right, hit the bricks.. You’re on your own,’ and now suddenly, people are calling me. It’s wild. It’s like, it’s this new era of new eras. It’s fantastic.”