WWE Invasion: The worst storyline in wrestling history?

The WWE Invasion angle had the potential to be the greatest storyline ever told in pro wrestling but instead for a multitude of reasons, it is marked down as arguably the biggest missed opportunity in WWE history.

In the 1990s with the Monday Night Wars and pro wrestling at its zenith, wrestling fans fantasised about what would happen if WWE and WCW collided.

Think Stone Cold Steve Austin versus Goldberg, The Undertaker versus Sting, D-Generation X versus the New World Order (NWO) and you start to get the picture.

So, when Vince McMahon “bought his competition” in early 2001 and ended the war once and for all (WWE had streaked clear of WCW from 1999 onwards), fans were salivating at the prospect of these match ups becoming a reality. A wrestling utopia was a very real possibility.

Instead, what the fans were treated to was a pale imitation of WCW, a WCW-lite if you will, and an “Invasion” that was in name only.

Sure, WCW arrived onto the scene with Booker T and Diamond Dallas Page, if only a DDP who had been altered from WCW’s own People’s Champion to a crazed stalker with a fixation on the then-wife of the Undertaker, but that was about it in terms of actual star power.

These two main eventers were supplemented by the likes of Lance Storm, Mike Awesome, Chuck Palumbo and Sean O’Haire. Not quite the all-star cast fans had been used to watching on Monday Nitro.

Even the addition of ECW, who had also recently been purchased by WWE, and Paul Heyman’s on-screen promise to take this invasion “to the extreme” did little to persuade viewers that this was anything but a lame duck of a programme.

1WWE versus a lightweight WCW/ECW alliance was not what they had fantasised about in the years prior.

There were numerous reasons