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With Ring of Honor running a tour of the United Kingdom this November under the "Reach For The Sky" banner, British promotion Preston City Wrestling announced on 9/5 that they were severing their three-year relationship with the company.
In the statement, PCW noted that they had contacted ROH on 8/21 and had not received a response to a number of issues they had raised with the promotion, including that ROH was running Liverpool the same night as PCW and that the ROH Liverpool event was also going to hurt the draw for PCW events the following weekend that were booked 40 minutes away, that PCW regulars were placed on "standby" for events and never brought to the United States and that PCW's Cruiserweight championship (held at the time by Adam Cole) was never defended within ROH, which PCW claims ROH promised would happen.
PCW then announced that planned events with ROH had been canceled and that the promotion would instead partner with Combat Zone Wrestling, Westside Xtreme Wrestling and Beyond Wrestling for a major Cruiserweight tournament.
PWInsider.com contacted ROH for comment on the situation yesterday and this afternoon, received the following statement:
ROH STATEMENT ON PCW
We have had the pleasure of working with PCW for the past few years, as they have brought several ROH wrestlers over for PCW events. In order to help PCW with promotion of their events, we allowed PCW to use the ROH logo and we were very happy with the work we did together.
Over the past few years, ROH has also been working toward producing our own tour of the UK, as the demand for our product has grown. It has been nearly a decade since we last produced a ROH-promoted tour and 2016 was the right time.
At the same time, ROH’s global presence has grown, thanks to working relationships with NJPW and most recently CMLL, while simultaneously growing our touring and television base domestically in the US.
We understand PCW felt slighted with our plans to promote our own tour and never did we plan to conflict with any of their dates. But with our schedule as currently constructed, only a few dates were available and unfortunately, there was a conflict.
When discussed, PCW and ROH agreed to not work together on a 2016 series of shows but the door was always open for the future.
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