On last night’s edition of Impact Wrestling, a vignette for NJPW’s El Phantasmo was shown to preview the 34-year-old’s pending arrival in the promotion. ELP going to Impact comes on the heels of NJPW’s David Finlay and Juice Robinson doing the same. FinJuice are the current Impact Wrestling tag-team champions and wore the title bouts to the ring during a recent NJPW tour.
Phantasmo is a former 2x IWGP Junior Heavyweight Champion. He’s also won the Super J-Cup tournament two years in a row in 2019 and 2020.
ELP is from Vancouver and began his training alongside other British Columbia bred wrestlers, Kyle O’Reilly and WWE’s Bollywood Boyz (aka the Singh Brothers).
Following the announcement of his forthcoming debut for Impact, Phantasmo named over a dozen wrestlers he wants to work with.
Forbidden No More
NJPW President Takami Ohbari recently commented on his company’s new approach to talent-sharing with other promotions:
“I will say this until I’m blue in the face: this is a star driven business, and the wrestlers are the focus,” Ohbari said in an interview with NJPW1972.com. “So if our wrestlers say ‘I want to wrestle that guy’ ‘I want to test myself against that guy’ ‘I want to show that I’m better than that guy’. Then it becomes our job as a company to do what we can to back them, make it happen and make it successful.”
