10 Worst Wrestling Match Stipulations Ever

7. Eye for an Eye Match

[Laughs] It’s a ping pong ball. I mean, I don’t know what I wanted from a finish for this match, wasn’t this though. So, much like TNA doing mad things to compete with the big dub, during 2020 WWE did a whole bunch of mad things to compete with the crushing reality that no-fans wrestling is bollocks.

Cue this turd, the highest stupidest concept in years, to win one wrestler must extract the eyeball of their opponent. Are you ok, WWE? Talk about booking your talent into a corner.

You have a match so conceptually horrific that you know that they can’t actually do the thing they’re promising so you spend the entire match completely disengaged from the good work Seth Rollins and Rey Mysterio were doing, waiting for the disconcerting smoke and mirrors to kick in, watching two very good wrestlers doing their best to come close but not actually do the thing that the company advertised because that would not be very sports entertaining of them.

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6. Fight for the Right

Hi TNA, good to see you again. You can just imagine the writer’s meeting that went into this one. What match do we do? Battle Royal? There’s been a lot of those. Reverse battle royal? What’s a reverse battle royal… everyone has to… GET IN the ring? Cool, that’s lunch.

It… it just doesn’t work, the fight for the right concept is this you have a load of wrestlers outside the ring, they fight to try and get in the ring, once about half the wrestlers are in the ring, everyone who didn’t make it is eliminated, THEN they do a battle royal, until there are two people, when they do a match, got it, good.

Except the order people are eliminated in the not-reverse part of the battle royal determines the seeding for a single-elimination tournament, the winner of which faces the winner of the singles match within the battle royal.

LOOK IT’S VERY SIMPLE, let’s start from the top, Vince Russo was born THE END.

Not only is that complicated to the point of having no stakes but just the act of people battling to get in a ring, it doesn’t work, don’t fight each other just rush into the ring and see what happens, stop wandering around outside looking for people to punch just get IN THE RING F**K. Doesn’t work. Doesn’t work so hard.

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5. King of the Mountain Match 

Hey, you’ve heard of a reverse battle royal, how about a reverse ladder match, it’s different it’s TNA. So what you think a reverse ladder match is, you’re right, climbing a ladder to hang a belt over the ring. Simple? You’re right, it’s too simple!

Five wrestlers start and before they can climb the ladder they have to become ‘eligible’ to climb it by pinning or submitting someone else, with the person they beat having to spend two minutes in a fucking shark cage to think about all the career choices that led them to this point.

Hey cool a shark cage, does that mean we can get two minutes of formless ugly brawling if two dudes get locked in at the same time, sure does fill your boots!

Then once you’re eligible you’ve got to get the belt from the ref, but once it’s got other people can steal it, unless you drop it in which it has to go back to the ref, sort of, most of the time? It’s madness.

Like I sort of understand why TNA stuck with the concept for ten pissing years, five dudes in a ladder match is more often than not going to have a few decent moments, but then just do a five-way ladder match.

There’s rethinking the wheel and then there’s adding four more wheels to a wheel so that the wheel doesn’t turn properly. 

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4. …On A Pole Match 

Eric Bischoff has Elimination Chamber, Chris Jericho has the Money in the Bank match, this is Vince Russo’s legacy. He didn’t invent them of course, but he sure did bring us the worst iterations of dudes fighting for a bit then scampering to grab a thing on a pole like a cat trying to catch a feather.

Stop making your wrestlers look uncool. Stop it. There’ve been loads of things suspended from polls over the years, contracts, kendo sticks, biker chains, viagra (wrestling just f**king tops isn’t it) a mum, a mum on a pole, a forklift technically, but fits the brief, TNA’s feast of fired match when there are four briefcases, on poles some have title shots, but one has a pink slip and then you’d be fired.

But if you lose the match you’re not fired, so why would you try and win? Finally, worst of all the San Francisco 49ers match where there were four boxes on poles, one had the WCW championship in it, with the other boxes containing a coal miners glove, a blowup doll, a picture of recently fired Scott Hall, rib-tickling stuff and then the final box fell apart with the belt falling to the floor on the outside. A legacy of tedious wank. 

• WCW
• TNA
• stipulation
• wwe

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