CAGEMATCH was founded on 15th of March, 2001, by the trio of Philip Kreikenbohm (a.k.a. "Matt Macks"), Nicolas Pape (a.k.a. "OldSchool") and Knut Linke (a.k.a. "Speddy Conzales"). We started out as a traditional combination of wrestling news site and discussion forum (the "Cageboard"), as we had some experience with this format and it was quite popular at the time. We officially opened the site to the public on 1st of June, 2001, with a team of about 20+ people that were mostly working on the discussion forum and posting news from around the wrestling world.
By 2003, OldSchool and Speddy Conzales had left the team due to personal reasons, which left Matt Macks in charge as the sole owner. Over the next couple of years, CAGEMATCH would change layouts a couple of times, while also adding more and more features the site which no longer was "just" a news portal. In 2007, we revolutionized the wrestling internet by not only establishing the first internet wrestling database but also creating the ratings system, which gave thousands of wrestling fans the opportunity to rate their favourite wrestlers, events, matches, etc.
Between January 2018 and March 2020, "CM Flosch" and "STRIGGA" joined Matt Macks as partial owners of the site, primarily so that Matt Macks could concentrate fully on the continued improvement of the website programming. Since March 2020, the site is back under 100% control of Matt Macks, although this time thankfully both CM Flosch and STRIGGA continued to be a crucial and important part of the team.
In total, over a hundred people have helped make CAGEMATCH a success. Currently we have over 30 voluntary team members who are working to keep the database up-to-date and fill in the gaps in history that we have not yet covered. Check the TEAM page for more information about the people behind the site.
