Okay okay I will admit it; dunking on WCW's stupidity is every wrestling writer's low hanging fruit. It's right up there with Big Show's numerous babyface/heel turns, Triple H's golden shovel and Vince McMahon's sheer, unbridled insanity. But when you really delve into the history of the company, even non-wrestling fans have to gasp at just how incompetently run this company that almost put the mighty World Wrestling Federation out of business was.

With a vast amount of resources due to the empire created by Ted Turner, WCW could afford to make mistakes that no other wrestling promotion before or since could make. What kind of mistakes am I talking about? Well they could have a roster of over 200 wrestlers... with some of them never even wrestling a match for WCW! Also, some of the wrestlers of value that they did sign for millions were horribly misused to the point where they would have been better off leaving them at home. How about blowing tons of money on musical acts who had nothing to do with wrestling? And finally, sometimes corporate decisions were made that LITERALLY did nothing. Not a thing. If you don't believe me, here are 15 ridiculous things WCW blew millions on. A big thank you to R.D Reynolds and Bryan Alvarez for their masterpiece Death of WCW book for many of these facts.

15 KISS Demon

KISS is one of the most influential bands in the history of music. Their showmanship and ability to suck fans dry of their money for so long is something that any pro wrestler should look at and give a round of applause. That said, nobody wanted to see KISS license a pro wrestler in 1999.

Due to some hair brained idea by Eric Bischoff, KISS was able to have a wrestler called the KISS Demon wrestle in WCW and was also guaranteed to have one main event match. Funnily enough, Bischoff was out of the company soon after the deal was struck so the Demon was largely ignored and his one "main event" was a mid card match vs The Wall where the Demon lost. Basically, this demon was the highest paid jobber in the world.

14 Master P And No Limit Soldiers

I'll admit. I don't know much about Master P. From what I can research, he was one of the most financially successful rappers of all time whose work as a rapper was overshadowed by his work as a producer and record label owner.

Some of his massive multi million fortune came courtesy of WCW's stupidity, which in of itself is vast.

Despite WCW being more of the "southern" promotion where rap wasn't quite as popular as in other parts of the country, Bischoff signed Master P to a deal where he was paid $200,000 PER APPEARANCE for a non-wrestler who likely didn't draw any wrestling fans in. Not only that, but Master P got his buddy Swoll signed to a $400,000 deal as well. He also didn't draw a dime.

13 Halloween Havoc 1998 Going Overtime

With the WWE Network nowadays, they don't have to worry about PPV anymore but during the Monday Night War, PPV was the one of the most important sources of revenue for the big two. Point being, don't piss off the cable companies. Guess what WCW did.

As the main event between WCW champ Goldberg and challenger DDP got underway, the feed for the PPV cut as it hit three hours. Nobody told the cable companies that the event was to run three and a half hours, so fans missed the main event. This caused tons of customers to demand refunds and by the time this debacle finished, WCW lost about $1.5 million because nobody picked up a phone. How did these people almost beat Vince McMahon?

12 Ultimate Warrior

The Ultimate Warrior has been ballooned up by the WWE to be a bigger deal than he really was. In reality, he was a flash in the pan whose title reign put WWE's business in the toilet and every subsequent return he made to WWE was marred in disaster. So with that in mind, WCW saw fit to hire the Ultimate Warrior in 1998.

For $1 million, Eric Bischoff signed Warrior to work 3 shows per month.

Warrior entered the company to much fanfare by interrupting a Hulk Hogan promo. Despite saying that beating Hogan was no big deal at WrestleMania VI, he challenged him to a rematch. This along with a bunch of hokey segments and Warrior's usual awful matches stained WCW and cost them a good chunk of change.

11 Wasting Bret Hart

Wrestling history would have been extremely different if WCW had decided not to make overtures towards WWE legend Bret Hart. Above anything else, the real reason why Hart left WWE was because WCW offered him so much damn money, $2.5 million for 125 days of work per year? It ain't Brock Lesnar money, but Hart couldn't say no to that. On top of that, Vince made it clear to Hart the WWE was in such financial peril that he couldn't afford to pay him the 20-year contract they had agreed to.

Unfortunately, all the money went to complete waste as WCW did close to nothing of value with their hottest acquisition.

It would take all the way until late 1999 for them to put him in the World Title picture and through most of his run kept him as a bland heel aligned with the nWo like so many others. Bret Hart in WCW should have been special; instead, he was just like everyone else.

10 WCW Latino Show

A good reason as to why WCW was able to get the ratings advantage over WWE throughout the early part of the Monday Night Wars was their roster of Mexican luchadores. Heck, they even went so far as to start a faction of an nWo type of spinoff - the Latino World Order. But that's not all WCW tried.

WCW decided to capitalize on their popularity by launching a new show for their Mexican audiences called WCW Latino. And it was a complete disaster.

The man who Eric Bischoff had cut the deal with, Mexican wrestling promoter Paco Alonso had backed out of the deal just before the first taping of the show and made a headache for WCW. Since the first taping was dead on arrival, $300,000 of production was scrapped.

9 Flying In The Entire Roster

WCW and WWE have had massive rosters throughout their history and especially during the Monday Night Wars. This was war however and both companies needed all hands on deck to win the battle for ratings supremacy. But this massive roster could bite you in the ass if you were the idiotic Neanderthal in charge of travel for WCW.

Get this; despite only using maybe 20-30 wrestlers per show, the promotion would purchase plane tickets for the ENTIRE roster.

Yes, since WCW had literally hundreds of wrestlers under contract, the company would buy tickets for dozens of wrestlers who would never use them. This finally stopped in 2000, one of the only smart decisions they made that year.

8 Unmasking Rey Mysterio?

Who is that child that with his arms stretched out in the middle of the ring? Why it's Rey Mysterio of course. Now I LOVE me some Rey Mysterio but Rey Mysterio without his mask is like Batman without his gadgets and costume; he's still great, but he's lacking a great part of his mystique.

Well we can thank the man who turned around WCW for good and for ill Eric Bischoff for that. For some reason, Eric Bischoff thought that Rey Mysterio was more marketable without his superhero outfit than with it. This of course cut all his merchandise sales tremendously as his masks could no longer be sold. This likely cost hundreds of thousands dollars in merchandise sales and caused all kinds of problems for Mysterio's reputation in Mexico.

7 Mike Awesome Signing

Mike Awesome may not have the same name cache as some other ECW performers, but in his time he was a big deal to the promotion and held their World Championship in late 1999 up until spring 2000.

WCW swooped in, signed Awesome and in typical WCW fashion did nothing with him. Correction; they did nothing of value with him.

Despite paying a six figure settlement to ECW just to get Awesome out of his contract, Awesome was brought to WCW and given a pair of gimmicks that cannot by any stretch of the imagination be designed to draw money. One was "That 70s Guy" which you can see above and "The Fat Chick Thriller" who was an icon for big women. Wow, that settlement was worth it.

6 Tank Abbott

The UFC wasn't always the global powerhouse it is now. It used to be just an underground cult league that was considered too low brow by the mainstream sports world. Naturally, WCW snagged one of their most controversial fighters Tank Abbott and signed him to a 3-year deal coming to $650,000 per year.

It should be noted Abbott had absolutely zero pro wrestling experience before being signed to this massive deal. Sure he was a somewhat charismatic personality and had a reputation for being a tough man, so naturally the company put him in a comedy angle with boy band stable Three Count near the end of his run. Abbott never drew a dime, not that it was necessarily his fault, but still a waste of money nonetheless.

5 KISSing Money Goodbye

So we already discussed the KISS Demon earlier in the article but that was only half the story. While it would have been stupid enough if there was just the KISS Demon, an even bigger waste of money was the actual introduction of the demon.

In August 1999, KISS was paid by Eric Bischoff to play their hit song "God of Thunder" on Nitro.

Now for just playing one song you wouldn't think that they would be paid much but this is money vacuum Gene Simmons we're talking about. So of course, this concert was a massive $500,000 bill to WCW. It should be noted that Dean Malenko said that it was the lowest rated segment on WWE's Rise and Fall of WCW documentary but to be fair he probably meant up until that date, as when 2000 came around, oh boy did ratings fall faster than Big Show off a top rope.

4 Junkyard Battle Royal

WCW has had some truly insane match concepts throughout their history. If some of you modern fans think that "The Final Deletion" was stupid, then you haven't seen their Junkyard Invitational Battle Royal at Bash At The Beach 1999.

Now Battle Royals on wrestling cards have two main benefits; you can get a lot of wrestlers on the card and there's a zero percent chance of injury barring any disasters. That second benefit goes away though when you put wrestlers in an actual junk yard which is extremely dangerous to work in, causing multiple wrestlers in the match to be injured.

Finally here's the trifecta of dumb; this match wasn't advertised before the PPV, it cost $100,000 to film and it was shown live instead of being taped so it could be edited to look cooler than it was. Dumb dumb dumb.

3 $400,000 Blunder Down Under

Wrestling promoters love sell out arenas. Heck they're so rare nowadays in WWE that Vince McMahon probably creams his extraordinarily expensive suits every time he gets one. However, only one promotion can be stupid enough to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars despite having a sell out tour. That, would be WCW.

In September of 2000, about half a year from the company folding up, WCW managed to sell out a tour of shows in Australia.

Heck even the horrendous Thunder sold out. The problem was, WCW had a deal where they would buy back any unused seats for their shows... these included seats being used for stage equipment and the ring area. When the tour was over, WCW managed to lose $400,000. Losing money was a bodily function to WCW, what can I say.

2 Ready To Rumble

Wrestling fans all know about David Arquette winning the WCW World Championship and how much of a travesty that was. But Arquette winning the title was a side effect of the real issue; the film Ready To Rumble itself. Boy was it a disaster.

The film was naturally distributed by Warner Bros. so in an indirect way, WCW's involvement in the movie can be linked to its success. Or lack there of as with a budget of $24 million and only a gross of $12.5 million, $11.5 million was lost on this movie. Not only that, but Rey Mysterio was injured on the set, costing them a star for this cinematic abomination. Simply put, this movie was black hole that decimated anything it came across.

1 Their Existence ($500 million sale)

Many of you are no doubt confused by what I mean by this slide's heading. How can WCW's existence be something they blew millions on? Well let me tell you a story about the final days of WCW.

While the company was hemorrhaging money by the year 2000, things in wrestling are fickle and things could turn around with a new direction and owners with deep pockets. As Warner was looking for buyers to sell WCW to, a group called SFX made an offer to buy WCW for... 500 MILLION DOLLARS. Ted Turner said no. In 2001, Vince McMahon bought the company for a mere $2.5 million. If Turner surrendered just a few months before, WCW might still be around today. My, how the ego of one man can change things.