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Minoru Suzuki And Harold Meij Leaving NJPW
Suzuki is unhappy with spot in the company.

New Japan Pro Wrestling's veteran hard b*stard Minoru Suzuki is set to leave the company.

According to Joe Lanza, speaking on the Voices of Wrestling podcast, the 51 year old is said to be unhappy with his current position in the promotion, and would have left already "if not for the Jushin Liger programme." The veteran has been involved in a feud with his fellow legend, which most recently saw him and Yoshinobu Kanemaru defeat the masked star and Toa Henare at Day 1 of New Japan Road.

It has been speculated that Suzuki will return to Pro Wrestling NOAH if and when he severs ties with New Japan.

The company's current president Harold Meij is also said to be seeking an exit from the company. The Dutch businessman, who has helped continue New Japan's successful expansion into the west this past year, is apparently quitting the company following their Tokyo Dome shows next year. No reason has been proffered as to why.
 

New Japan Pro Wrestling Announced The Teams For This Year’s Super Junior Tag League


Soon after New Japan Pro Wrestling‘s next big show, King of Pro Wrestling on October 14, the Road to Power Struggle begins, and with it, Super Junior Tag League. Last night, NJPW announced the teams, a mix of experienced duos and a lot of new pairings, who will compete for a big, shiny trophy and a match for the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Team Team Championship at Wrestle Kingdom.

How Super Junior Tag League Works

For most years since it began in 2010, New Japan’s autumn junior heavyweight tag team competition was called Super Junior Tag Tournament and was an eight-team, single-elimination tournament. Last year, though, it became Super Junior Tag League and started operating under the same round-robin format as the G1 Climax, but with one block. That’s how the 2019 tournament will work as well.

The teams will all wrestle each other throughout the tour and earn two points for each win, zero for each loss, and one for each tie. The top-scoring teams will go to the final and the winner will earn a match for the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship at Wrestle Kingdom. It’s possible not only the winner will end up in the match, though, based on last year’s tag league result.

The 2018 final was a triple threat and the winners (Roppongi 3K) never pinned or submitted one of teams in the final (Bushi and Shingo Takagi), so both of those teams made it into the title match at Wrestle Kingdom along with the champs (El Desperado and Yoshinobu Kanemaru), and the guys who didn’t win tag league ended up winning the titles at last year’s. New Japan tournaments tend to make sense, at least in terms of math and use of win-loss records, but judging from history, there’s a possibility that this one won’t!

All of these tournament matches will be available to watch on NJPW World, some as part of live shows and the ones on house shows uploaded individually later. The live Road to Power Struggle/Super Junior Tag League shows will take place on October 16-17, 27-28, and 30-31. The league final will be part of Power Struggle on November 3.
With all that out of the way, let’s go over the teams in this year’s Super Junior Tag League.

The Super Juniors Tagging In This Year’s League

The team in this year’s tag league with the best record is Roppongi 3K, who won the 2017 and 2018 iterations of the tournament. Earlier this year, it looked like Sho and Yoh might go heavyweight when they earned a shot at the IWGP Heavyweight Tag Team Championship, but they’re back with the juniors after losing that championship match with the Guerrillas of Destiny, which took place on a house show in the U.S. Roppongi 3K are sure to be a lot of people’s favorites to win this year’s Super Junior Tag League, and it wouldn’t be shocking to see them try to enter the heavyweight one later this fall too.

Suzukigun’s Yoshinobu Kanemaru and El Desperado are the other competing duo with significant tag team experience. They held the junior tag titles for most of last year and made it to the tag league final. Even if this tournament doesn’t get them back in the title picture, it should be fun to see El Desperado again, who was out of action for months after suffering a broken jaw and is scheduled to make his return to the ring at King of Pro Wrestling.

Two other teams fans can reasonably expect to go far are the Birds of Prey (Will Ospreay and Robbie Eagles) and the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Champions, Taiji Ishimori and El Phantasmo. ELP made his NJPW debut just before Best of the Super Juniors, he and Ishimori beat R3K for the junior tag titles in their first match as a tag team, and he won this summer’s Super J-Cup, so he’s pretty much the top heel of the junior division now. There’s also a chance he could go into this tournament as Junior Heavyweight Champion if he beats Ospreay at King of Pro Wrestling next week.

Ospreay and Eagles had their first match as a team at Royal Quest after getting together as part of a storyline where ELP and Eagles were having an Internal Bullet Club Quarrel and Eagles turned on BC to join Chaos. They have a lot of neat tag team moves and showed them off in a title match against Phantasmo and Ishimori at Destruction in Kagoshima.

A wild card team in this year’s Super Junior Tag League is the Coach And Coach Connection (not actually their name) of Rocky Romero and Ryusuke Taguchi. Both of these wrestlers have had some of their most significant NJPW career accomplishments in the junior tag team division, but with not with each other. The product of the Chaos-home team alliance, R3K thinking about going heavyweight, and a BOSJ battle to determine the true head coach of New Japan (Taguchi won, but he said they could be co-head coaches), the Romero-Taguchi tag team has the potential to do all comedy or all technical wrestling, or somewhere in between. They could believably get zero points or make it to the finals.

Three more new teams who are less likely to rack up a lot of points round out the tournament lineup: CMLL’s Volador Jr. and Titán, Tiger Mask and Yuya Uemura, and TJP and Clark Connors. Volador Jr. made his first Super Junior Tag League appearance last year teaming with Soberano Jr., while Titán wrestled alongside Ángel de Oro and Dragon Lee in the 2016 and 2017 single-elimination Super Jr. Tag Tournaments, respectively. Both luchadores have also competed in NJPW as singles wrestlers.

Tiger Mask sadly won’t team up with Jushin Thunder Liger like he has every junior tag tournament since 2012 but will be a veteran partner for Young Lion Uemura. LA Dojo trainee Clark Connors will also tag with a more experienced wrestler in TJP, who will be performing for NJPW in Japan the first time since BOSJ 2011. The former WWE Cruiserweight Champion made appearances for New Japan earlier this year in the Super J-Cup and Fighting Spirit Unleashed tours in the U.S. and wrestled for the company in the early 2000s.

A notable absence from the year’s tag league is Bushi or any representation of Los Ingobernables de Japon. Bushi and Hiromu Takahashi made it to the semi-finals of the tag tournament in 2017 and the team of Bushi and Shingo Takagi made it the final last year, but with Takagi having moved to the heavyweight division at the end of this year’s G1 and Takahashi still out injured (and I guess they couldn’t nab Kawato-San from CMLL and give him some eyeliner or something) (or have Naito claim to have lost five pounds) it looks like Bushi will have the tour off. There also no participants from Ring of Honor this year.
 

Rumour: NJPW To Launch Women's Division With Stardom Purchase?

Could THIS be the major Japanese wrestling story teased earlier this week?

Something massive is brewing in Japanese wrestling at the moment.

Dave Meltzer reported earlier this week that a huge puroresu story would be breaking later in the week, leading to immediate speculation that WWE were on the verge of launching NXT Japan, with a potential Dragon Gate partnership mentioned.

Now, the talk has turned to a different kind of partnership: one between New Japan Pro Wrestling and World Wonder Ring Stardom - the country's leading joshi promotion.

This is entirely speculative at the moment, but the rumour is everywhere right now, from Reddit to social media. It states that NJPW's parent company, Bushiroad, may have purchased Stardom, and that this could lead to New Japan starting their own women's division or keeping the smaller company going under the Bushiroad banner.

From Io Shirai and Kairi Sane to current roster members like Mayu Iwatani and Momo Watanabe, Stardom has long been considered a fertile breeding ground for Japan's most promising female wrestlers.
 

NJPW’s Parent Company Purchases Stardom

The parent company of NJPW has acquired prominent women’s promotion Stardom, according to a new report. Yahoo! Japan reports that Bushiroad is aqcuiring the company and an official announcement is expected to come tomorrow.

Bushiroad has been interested in buying Stardom since February, according to the report. Stardom has confirmed the news on Twitter.

The purchase will obviously big for wrestling in Japan, though there is no word as to how the two promotions will work together moving forward, if at all. The companies could obviously just end up operating separately as promotions under the same umbrella.
 

More On Bushiroad Purchasing Stardom, WWE Trying To Buy The Promotion, Stardom


Last night, it was announced that New Japan Pro Wrestling parent company Bushiroad purchased Stardom, the all-women Japanese promotion. Founded in 2010, the promotion has featured names like Io Shirai, Toni Storm, Bea Priestley, Hana Kimura, Kagetsu and Mayu Iwatani

Bushiroad's Takaaki Kitani and Stardom's Rossy Ogawa reportedly met back in April, but a deal between the two sides wasn't completed until August. There was a joint press conference with Stardom talent involved following the news.

Starting December 1, 2019, the company name will be changed from Kix Road Co., Ltd. to Bushiroad Fight Co., Ltd. Hiroshi Ogawa will remain the CEO of Stardom, and while the name "Stardom" will be the same, World Wonder Ring Stardom will not exist. As a result of the different branding and TV promotions (NJPW is part-owned by TV-Asahi and the Stardom TV deal is with NTV), Dave Meltzer reported at F4WOnline that both New Japan and Stardom will be run and kept completely separate from one another. Meltzer added that if there was a need by New Japan for women's matches during foreign shows, something may be able to work out.

Meltzer also noted on Wrestling Observer Radio that WWE had made an offer to purchase Stardom as well. WWE had recently tried to purchase NOAH as well, so they are serious about getting into the Japanese market.

Following the rebrand, advertising and global marketing strategies will be implemented starting in January 2020. This will be developed by BS Nippon Television, with programming on BS NTV every Thursday and a 30-minute program on TOKYO MX.

In regards to talent, Stardom women will be receiving full-time contracts. There are also plans to bring in wrestlers from all over the world.

"We will create contracts with each wrestler," Bushiroad stated. "We want to create an environment where the wrestlers can concentrate on pro wrestling, and we are expecting to bring in excellent wrestlers from all over the world. We would like to listen to the thoughts of each wrestler and take those thoughts into account when creating this new work environment."

The opportunities for big shows were announced during the press conference as well. Stardom will run Korakuen Hall 14 times in 2020, with consecutive shows on August 8th and 9th. The first major show for the brand will be on April 29, 2020 inside Tokyo's Ota Ward Gym. In 2021, there will be a 10th Anniversary show. While a future in the United States is unclear, Stardom will take part in "CharaExpo USA 2019" on December 7th and 8th inside the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, CA. The featured bout for the promotion will be Mayu Iwatani and Tam Nakano v. Sumie Sakai and Nicole Savoy.
 
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