In March 2001, Vince McMahon did the unthinkable: he bought WCW, his greatest rival. For years, the WWF and WCW were locked in the Monday Night Wars, where each company tried to crush the other in ratings, storylines, and fan loyalty. WCW had once dominated the WWF, but by 2001, it was a flaming dumpster fire of bad decisions and falling ratings and PPV buy rates.
So Vince McMahon, in true Vince fashion, bought his competition. And not just WCW - he also picked up ECW, the ultra-violent, beer-soaked promotion that birthed legends like Rob Van Dam. Taz(z) and the Dudley Boyz. (Kind of, and he got in legal trouble for pretending that he did own the bankrupt and ownerless ECW. The WWE did officially buy it in 2003). Suddenly, Vince had all the toys.
Fans expected dream match after dream match: Stone Cold vs. Goldberg. Undertaker vs. Sting. DX vs. the nWo. We were all ready. We were all excited!
THE INVASION BEGINS… SORT OF
The storyline officially kicked off in June 2001, with WCW Champion Booker T attacking WWF Champion Stone Cold Steve Austin, and WCW’s Diamond Dallas Page stalking The Undertaker’s wife. That led quickly to July 2001 with the Invasion pay-per-view. But here’s the twist: most of WCW’s biggest stars - Goldberg, Sting, Hulk Hogan, Scott Hall, Kevin Nash - were sitting at home collecting fat paychecks from Time Warner (who still had them under contract). So instead of a WCW superteam, we got… Buff Bagwell and Sean O’Haire.
Yeah. Exactly.
The WCW brand was so poorly received by fans that Vince quickly scrapped his original creative plans, which I detailed in my Invasion article but I’ll cover again quickly here.
The plan was for WCW to launch as its own brand and thanks to a divorce storyline between Vince and Linda McMahon, the company would be “split in two” allowing them to build up as opposing forces for the interbrand warfare as promised. This likely would have been awesome as given a few months, some of those bigger name WCW stars would have been available to join in. This storyline was eventually recycled as the WWF’s first Brand Split in March 2002. There were lots of reasons this didn’t work but the biggest one was Vince’s total lack of faith and genuine belief that WCW - his old rival - was worthless to most people’s eyes.
Instead, he turned WCW into an invading force to integrate their talents on WWF TV that way. WCW’s roster was pretty sparse so ECW was brought in too, spearheaded by his daughter and the Invasion intercompany war that fans were so excited about became yet another McMahon vs. McMahon story.
Thus was born The Alliance: a merged WCW/ECW group with the goal of taking down the WWF from the inside.
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
Instead of WCW and ECW talents rising up and becoming stars themselves, WWF wrestlers turned heel and joined The Alliance. Most notably: Stone Cold Steve Austin, the WWF Champion. Anyone the WWF had plans on being a bad guy simply joined the Alliance and quickly the actual WCW and ECW stars and new faces were shunted to the back.
This completely flipped the script - The Invasion became about WWF guys in WWF t-shirts vs. WWF guys in WCW/ECW t-shirts.
Meanwhile, actual fresh faced stars like Booker T, Rob Van Dam, and DDP tried to get over with WWF fans, but they were usually jobbed out to The Rock or Undertaker, all things WCW being presented as second fiddle to the almighty World Wrestling Federation.
THE DEATH OF THE INVASION
By November 2001, just five months after it began, the entire Invasion storyline ended at Survivor Series in a classic "winner takes all" match. Team WWF (Rock, Jericho, Taker, Kane, Big Show) faced Team Alliance (Austin, RVD, Booker T, Shane McMahon, Kurt Angle). WWF won. The Alliance was disbanded. WCW and ECW were dead with zero fanfare. Curtain closed.
No Goldberg. No Sting. No nWo. It felt like watching the buildup for Avengers and getting a fight between Hawkeye’s wife and Ironman’s butler instead.
THE LEGACY
Fans to this day dream about what could’ve been if Vince had just waited a year to bring in the big WCW names and do it right. In truth there are ways he could have made the whole thing work even with the limited stars he had by simply presenting them as strong and a threat to the WWF, and maybe making smarter more logical choices about who jumped ship to help (former WCW World Champion Big Show, or mainstay Chris Jericho for example, rather than men like Christian and Test who had never worked anywhere BUT the WWF).
If Vince had waited a year however, he’d have had all the firepower he needed as all of those big WCW names did eventually call the WWF (and later WWE) home. Ric Flair debuted the night after Survivor Series and the end of the Invasion, something which upset a lot of people, timing wise. The original nWo team of Hogan, Hall and Nash showed up in February 2002, and Eric Bishoff - WCW’s on-screen authority figure and real life executive and booker - was in the WWE by July 2002, less than a year after the Invasion PPV.
There was good to be found in the Invasion - the WWF debuts of Rob Van Dam and Booker T who would stick around as mainstays and eventually World Champions for the next several years, lots of great matches on TV and PPV, and impressive financial success for the WWF despite the poor booking (though one can only imagine how much more money they’d have made with an Invasion done right). The Invasion itself however is best remembered for being the start of a booking tailspin that saw the WWF/WWE go from cultural phenomenon and TV rating juggernaut to being half as popular and fighting to maintain its fan base only two years later. Lots of people who watched at the time drew that line between WWF and the rebrand to WWE in May 2002 but really, it was pre- and post-Invasion where the real divide began.