From the Four Horsemen to The Shield, there’s nothing quite like a good faction in wrestling.
That ‘strength in numbers’ vibe can give rise to an air of invincibility, and when plotlines are well written it can lead to the group members becoming solo stars in their own right and/or some memorable matches being contested between former allies when the inevitable inter-faction beef occurs.
But sadly, for every faction that dominates in the ring, there are several more that fail to when the appetite of the fans.
So let’s take a look at some of the worst factions in wrestling history.
The League of Nations
What do Rusev, Sheamus, Alberto Del Rio and Wade Barrett have in common?
Well, nothing really, apart from the fact that their characters all hail from outside of the US – fertile ground, according to Vince McMahon, for a heel faction to thrive.
The anti-American sentiment is well-trodden ground for heels in wrestling, of course, but nobody has done it quite as well as the Iron Sheikh did back in the 1980s and this quartet certainly don’t have the mic talent to rival the WWF legend.
The League of Nations was simply a device to give relevance to four disparate individuals, and the WWE universe saw straight through it.
Aces & Eights
Possibly always, but certainly in 2012, TNA needed a major storyline spark to enhance interest in their product.
Their main play was a ‘takeover’ storyline involving the mysterious Aces & Eights, a gang of motorbike-riding outlaws who were fed up of the status quo. They began terrorizing everyone in TNA, from general manager Hulk Hogan to the main roster.
D-Von Dudley was revealed as the first member of the clan, with the likes of Bubba Ray (sorry, ‘Bully Ray’) Dudley, Mr Anderson, D’Lo Brown and even expert commentator Tazz later outed as being with the group.
And then… nothing. Aces & Eights just sort of fizzled out at the hands of The Main Event Mafia, and then they were essentially airbrushed from the annals of time.
Ironically, given their slow and painful existence, Aces & Eights took their name from the poker hand known as the ‘Dead Man’s Hand’, a pair of aces and eights held by famous Wild West gunfighter Wild Bill Hickok at the time of his death. You can learn more about poker and other card games at resource sites such as Casino Market, and hopefully any connection you have with an online casino will last longer than Aces & Eights’ run in TNA!
The J.O.B Squad
This combination of Hardcore Holly, Al Snow and 2 Cold Scorpio was like a meta faction, with McMahon trolling us all by pitching three jobbers together in a bid to get them over with the crowd.
In truth, Snow was always over with fans thanks to his madcap antics, and Holly would see his career revitalized with the advent of the Hardcore Championship.
But Scorpio and subsequent J.O.B. Squad members Gillberg and the Blue Meanie were just terrible, and proof that building a faction around uninteresting wrestlers is not some kind of shortcut to relevance.
The Misfits in Action
As we’ve seen, Vince has a penchant for clubbing together disparate wrestlers and shoehorning them together in an unholy alliance based on… usually, pretty much next to nothing.
What was bizarre with the Misfits in Action is that he paired two genuinely excellent in-ring performers (Booker T and Chavo Guerrero), gave them terrible nicknames like G.I. Bro and Lt. Loco, and – too make matters worse – teamed with some no-hopers like The Wall (Sgt AWOL) and Bill DeMott (the awfully-monikered General Rection).
This was one of the worst of a long list of terrible ideas in WCW, and just another example of the tremendously bad factions that wrestling has witnessed over the past four decades or so.
