10 Ways WWE Disrespects Its Fans

7. WWE vs. NXT

 

Sigh. Where do you… how do you even start?

How do you even try to explain to someone who doesn’t watch WWE that there is a branch of WWE that everyone really likes, or at the very least liked, that constantly receives heaps of praise from fans and industry alike, and WWE has decided to reshape it based on decades old standards of populating it with the credo “no more midgets”.

WWE already had a dicey relationship with the black and yellow brand, pinning its champion in less than two minutes with a veteran painted like a psychedelic frog, whacking paper plates on a bunch of their stars and giving them names out of the Black and Decker catalogue, or ridiculing The Ascension for weeks for a fleeting nostalgia segment populated by confused grandpas.

We accepted that, almost as the yin to NXT’s yang, that WWE needed to balance out the quality somehow, but now it appears that WWE is aiming to rip out the very heart, the high workrate low stature heart, the blackheart and all heart no soul, rip that out of everyone’s favourite bit about WWE wrestling, and replacing it with more land of the giants bulls**t.

It’s not the past WWE, it’s not then, it’s now, but judging from recent reports, not forever.

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6. All Hail The Legends

Goldberg is wrestling for the WWE Championship at SummerSlam, and look he’s not going to win, or at least, if this goes out and he won yesterday, then it doesn’t matter because you won’t be watching this, you’ll be too busy picking up shards of TV from your carpet, but how is he still a thing in 2021.

How is Jeff Hardy beating undefeated behemoths and expecting no one to care because he came out to his song from 12 years ago.

And hey, maybe WWE doesn’t really have much of a choice, maybe it does need to bring back The Rock and John Cena and Goldberg and the things we remember because without them the current starpower of its roster isn’t enough to make the Big Four feel like Big Four shows, but just look back at 1998 to 2001, wrestling’s hottest boom period, all of the Big Four shows main evented by current talent that were there every single week.

Doesn’t it just make the rest of us feel like chumps for watching every week where really WWE are telling us that the only weeks that matter each year are the few weeks leading up to the big shows when Taker might have come back or Brock, or anyone else who sticks their head in the door for WWE’s version of sweeps, rather than the roster they have, or should I say… had.

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5. Endless Releases

It just makes me sad at this point. It’s been an endless conveyor of ‘who’s gone’, since WrestleMania and look, on one tiny level, I get it. WWE panic-bought all the wrestlers it could a few years ago, and didn’t have room to promote everyone, so some people drift away.

That I understand. Buddy Murphy, Malakai Black, The Iiconics, Andrade, Braun Strowman, Bray Wyatt, that I do not understand, and when people of that calibre can vanish into the wind, sometimes in the middle of a rebrand, how unsure for their jobs that must make 90% of the roster, really makes me f**king sad, especially when WWE is objectively not hurting for money, which makes all the spin of budget cuts even more insulting to the fans intelligence.

It doesn’t matter who we like at the end of the day, and for all of our pointless sound and fury, and this entire list is a load of pointless sound and fury, ultimately we can’t protect our favourite stars, which as the authority, you’d really think we’d have negotiated that as part of the deal.

But we can’t protect them, because we don’t always have the same values as WWE.

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4. Wrestling Isn’t The Draw

It really doesn’t make any sense that WWE can have so much talent on its books but so few of them feel like stars, despite often being imported to WWE BECAUSE of their indie starpower.

Why is it, he asked pompously pretending to have any answers to the complex working of an entire corporation? Because wrestling isn’t the draw.

Like honestly, WWE should be the easiest thing in the world to book, take someone good, pit them against someone else that’s good, say to the crowd, oh man this is going to be good, heres where you can see them fight and here’s how much it costs and that’s the sell.

NXT do it, putting together those excellent hype packages, sit down interviews, doing their best to not give away the important thing, the match itself.

On the main roster, Rhea Ripley and Charlotte’s amazing talent for wrestling takes second fiddle to weird skits about crutches, challengers for midcard titles earn their shot by beating the champion, giving away the match they’re trying to sell.

Obviously storyline is a vital part of wrestling but WWE produces matches to get to certain story moments, not the other way around. And they hold so many matches.

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