WWE announced this past weekend during WrestleMania that it had purchased Mexican wrestling promotion AAA. The sale of the Lucha-based company, established in 1992 by founder Antonio Peña, is expected to close in the third quarter of 2025 and has been executed as part of WWE’s global expansion strategy.
In partnership with Fillip, a Mexican-based sports and entertainment holding company, the two entities will work together to promote “Worlds Collide” on June 7 in Los Angeles. While no matches have been announced, the card will showcase the best of NXT and AAA.
The full press release is available online at WWE.com.
Within the release, HHH stated the following:
“AAA has a rich cultural heritage with some of the most passionate fans in the world and it’s an honor to work with the Peña family to embark on this journey,” said (Paul) Levesque. “By bringing together WWE’s global capabilities and AAA’s amazing tradition, we look forward to an exciting future filled with new opportunities.”
Fillip co-Founder and co-CEO Hugo López-Velarde echoed HHH’s sentiments.
“We look forward to partnering with WWE and TKO on this venture to secure the future of AAA for fans and to help take this business to the next level,” said López-Velarde.
And finally, the family of AAA founder Antonio Peña stated:
“AAA has been a family-operated promotion for over three decades and our trust could not be better placed than with one of the biggest sports entertainment businesses in the world,” said AAA General Manager Dorian Roldán Peña.
Lucha Libre means so much to Hispanic wrestling fans. Within wrestling it is a cultural touchstone, and for that community it is a representation of a cultural identity that people who live outside that reality or sphere simply will never understand. The common fan might look at it and frame it as “just another style” of wrestling. Similarly to how the concept of “fighting spirit” is ingrained in Japanese culture and how that manifests within the context of a wrestling match, there’s an equally relevant sense of identity within the culture that gives Lucha its character and vibrancy.
Wrestling Headlines contributor LWO4Life, who is one of the most passionate Lucha Libre fans I know, has legitimate concerns about TKO’s purchase. In his recent column, “Exploring AAA and What TKO Must Know Going In,” he wrote:
“After thinking about this, whereas at first I was excited, I now cannot see a positive for this move. Unless AAA was in such dire financial need that they needed to sell, the overall business of Lucha Libre is in trouble. AAA is not a perfect company, it doesn’t even show pure Lucha. Of the companies, it’s the most reckless, sometimes sloppy show in Mexico. But, it’s still authentically Mexican, and it still is Lucha in a way that pushes Lucha to modernize. That cannot be obtained by being run by Triple H and Shawn Michaels. Unless the ghosts of Jose Lothario and Gory Guerrero run AAA themselves, I don’t see qualified people associated with WWE able to run it.”
Throughout he explores both the positives and negatives of the sale, but ultimately errs on the side of having genuine concern about how a WWE-led, or at least facilitated mission statement carried out by Fillip, functions and serves the core values of Lucha as a whole. To the ultimate end, while he notes there is potential from the perspective of gaining both stability and a global platform to build on, that ultimately the core values of what Lucha culturally represents could be compromised.
What’s more concerning is the scope of what’s potentially coming. It’s no secret that a component of HHH’s vision of NXT was to establish a collective of regional brands in select markets to help foster and grow the larger WWE brand. That would — hypothetically — effectively occur through establishing a regional dominance of that localized market where an NXT UK, for example, would build stars and funnel them up to WWE. The issue with that was the negative impact of how NXT UK cannibalized the local British scene. While there are many factors that led to the weakened state of the U.K. scene, WWE scooping up many name brand talents did it no favours.
There are similar fears in Japan, where it’s also been long rumoured that HHH was looking at establishing an NXT Japan. Some of the potential for that development at the time focused on Pro Wrestling Noah and All Japan Pro Wrestling as potential purchase targets. More recently it’s been fairly clear WWE and Noah have a strong relationship between their sending Shinsuke Nakamura, Omos and Josh Briggs for runs of varying lengths in the Japanese promotion founded by Mitsuharu Misawa. Additionally their reverence and treatment of Muta, including his hall of fame induction, are noteworthy.
That perspective has gained more ground with the founding of Marigold in 2024 by Rossy Ogawa, who for some time had allegedly been favourable to WWE as a landing spot for Stardom talents like Iyo Sky, Kairi Sane and more recently Giulia. Now with Noah and Marigold under the Wrestle Universe banner (owned by CyberFight), that potential is a little more real.
While these promotional transformations are not imminent, or perhaps even likely, the contrasting point against them needs to be raised. Given WWE’s past outlook where purchasing promotions to fuel its monopoly is concerned, it is not as though there aren’t precedents. WCW, Evolve and the effect of NXT UK on the U.K. indie scene are just three semi-recent examples. And furthermore if we consider WWE’s history, a purchase of TNA is not unfathomable.
We cannot forget that in North America there was a wrestling monopoly for nearly 20 years, and in that time WWE’s quality suffered in the absence of competition or a challenger brand. That tonal stagnation fuelled general complacency which if not for the philosophical differences in how ROH and TNA operated in contrast and their missions and collective cultures that defined them, the business would have been worse off.
The jury is still out on will happen between WWE, CyberFight and TNA, but the deal to secure AAA and its assets should at least give us a moment of pause to question if the benefits to TKO actively pursuing sales of other promotions outweigh the negatives. In my opinion they don’t.
Each promotion was founded based on unique principles that were informed by the culture of the region, be that a version of strong style, the strength of one’s fighting spirit or the sacredness of one’s mask and what it represents. It can also be something as a simple as defying the status quo. Further to that point, any action that departs from those core values homogenizes wrestling into the same flavor of ice cream. The brand and its culture become hollow like WWE’s ECW did in contrast to Paul Heyman’s original vision.
There’s a stark difference between monopolization and ownership, which the AAA sale is, and partnerships anchored in mutually beneficial co-promotion. That is the value of AEW in modern wrestling along with its U.K. partners, NJPW, Stardom and CMLL. The two should not be confused because the former is reductive to a healthy wrestling landscape, whereas the latter has greater potential to be a constructive way forward.
As LWO pointed out, if we compromise the core values of promotional culture we lose sight of what makes wrestling special from one perspective to the next. That can manifest in Lucha potentially being watered down under the WWE banner, or perhaps in the past we don’t get that groundbreaking TNA Knockouts division all those years ago. Without ECW, we don’t have an Attitude era. Culture is key because it’s the heartbeat of the moment and it’s unique to those who invest in it. We can’t lose sight of the sense that as much as this AAA deal has been promoted as a partnership under the WWE umbrella, AEW has the co-operative market cornered whereas WWE’s past in buying other companies is very evident.
WWE and TKO in the bigger picture will do as they please. They have that leverage in the market. However, as wrestling consumers and/or critics that’s where we come in to vote with our wallets and support the work and the companies we enjoy. Every company has something of value to offer, and so many positive movements have been made since 2019. However, we need to acknowledge that if left to their own devices, WWE/TKO’s potential moves to buy up more wrestling promotions is more destructive than not.
