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UK wrestling is big, but there's no one company that's massive and a lot of that is to do with the aforementioned lack of the mid-tier arenas. That 5* Wrestling that was going to do the 128 man tournament across the UK was booking out 15,000-20,000 arenas for it hoping the TV exposure would be enough, but they're a promotion created to promote a video game and expected to do that after their second show, so they're small time.
There's a few promotions that are based in various cities but tour a couple of times a year and are big enough that they sell out the 2-4,000 seaters when they tour. They are
PROGRESS
ICW
RevPro
IPW
Then the newer promotions that haven't tried leaving their city yet
PCW
TIDAL
ATTACK! (Which is a comedy federation run by Pete Dunne and Mark Andrews where their most recent show had a NES explode and had weird things happen like Tyler Bate and Pete Dunne Freaky Friday with each other)
Kamikaze Pro
Then you have WCPW, which is weird since the crowd that goes to them apparently doesn't watch any other wrestling. They're a strange company, run by people who made videos about wrestling for WhatCulture, shows uploaded to YouTube and their match with El Patron V Rey Mysterio pulled in over 11million views. It's only been going a year and the quality is OK, so I'm interested to see what happens with them.
There are some legitimate draws out there. Cool King backed me up that Grado kind of became a big enough name out of wrestling that you'll occasionally hear from random people "Hey, you like wrestling, right? That Grado is coming down if you want to go" which is bizarre to me since he did it off a BBC documentary about wrestling and just joking on Twitter.
World of Sport didn't fall through because of lack of interest. 1.25 million viewers on New Years Eve when people are out is nothing to sniff at... But Jeff Jarrett got involved and it went tits up.
The big cities that have these promotions are certainly gaining traction, but without the mid-tier arenas, there's not much room for growth. I think PROGRESS should look at going to the US more often and maybe opening a division there and see how it goes. I think they've got the most potential to break out.
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