The Follies Of WWE Corporate In 2021

I’m really looking to hit on the low-hanging fruit this year, and there is perhaps none that hangs lower than the follies of WWE Corporate over the past two or three years.

WWE Corporate has cut enough talent to start two new promotions with: one big and one small, and “talent” had nothing to do with it when you consider some of the names who are not only still employed, but hogging prominent spots on the main roster – names such as Happy Corbin. I don’t blame Happy, though. I blame Vince McMahon, as much as it pains me to do so. Ric Flair, in recent comments on his new podcast, couldn’t do it. He deflected all of the blame for WWE’s corporate strategy to Nick Khan.

But here’s a hot take: I happen to like Nick Khan and think he’s effective in his role. Despite his title, his role has absolutely nothing to do with keeping talent happy and putting on an effective wrestling show. His job is to make the WWE money and cutting talent contracts is one way to put more money back into the pockets of the admin team while fattening the company up for a potential sale. However, that’s not the messaging WWE decided to use on the latest round of releases, the one prior to that (that took place just weeks beforehand), the one prior to that, or even the one prior to that.

Instead, WWE cited “budget cuts.” Yeah. “Budget cuts” for a company that will have grossed a billion dollars in revenue by the year 2028 from the Saudi Arabia government alone. Khan may have been a fan as a kid, but he’s not a wrestling guy – he’s a businessman with one objective. So for that reason, the onus has to fall on McMahon, and if McMahon were to be slowly going the way of Joe Biden, I’d probably have more sympathy. However, he’s been in this game for a long time and he’s still as sharp as a tack, which is why it’s so puzzling to see him content with letting go of several metric tons of talent without any care.

As the chairman, it’s Vince’s responsibility to make sure the messaging aligns with the vision. If those wires have gotten crossed, the blame would have to fall on him. Otherwise, the blame would still fall to him because the messaging is complete shit, and to see talent such as Karrion Kross, John Morrison, Taya Valkryie and so many more be treated as expendable parts makes me ache.

I work in athletic communications. There is a corporate side to that, as there is with anything else. But people don’t get into this field to become a corporate drone or to do corporate work. They get into athletic communications to DO athletic communications, just like how people get into pro wrestling to DO pro wrestling. That’s something WWE has lost sight of. Whether you want to call it pro wrestling or sports entertainment, WWE Corporate NEEDS to have some level of passion in order for anyone to look at this company in a favorable light again. The constant lying to and misdirection of the talent, as well as the duplicitous nature of the higher-ups, would be seen as a culture issue at any other company. But for WWE, it’s par for the course, and it starts at the top. I can’t wait until WWE sells.

“Bad Booking,” as friend of the site Paul Green likes to say, is something that has plagued WWE even all the way back to 2004 when I first started watching. However, it wasn’t near as prevalent. We know that WWE’s crass, tone-deaf angles have turned off the viewers for years (see any line graph depicting the ratings free-fall), but WWE Corporate has made excuses for this, such as the rise of social media and having to go head-to-head with Monday Night Football and occasionally playoff basketball and hockey. Excuses, not reasons.

But now, WWE’s shit product has watered down high points such as Edge’s return to the road and Big E’s WWE Championship reign, and the live crowds are taking notice. Attendance figures for the weekly shows have begun to crater, and the fact that NXT, despite getting a full-blown makeover (in more ways than one), is STILL the best brand the company has to offer speaks volumes.

Bad writing is only half of it. Bad booking has been just as meaningful to WWE’s decline. The average feud used to be, if nothing else, original. But now, the creatively bankrupt company goes to the same, tired formula for feuds, which is booking rematch after rematch for months on end until it finds something else for both wrestlers to do. The WWE version of “changing things up” is putting two feuding wrestlers in a tag team to see if they can “co-exist,” combining feuds into an occasional tag team match or having a “Draft” that isn’t really a draft, but a grab bag used as a reason for wrestlers switching shows only to be rendered completely meaningless in months’ time.

With WWE being run by an individual who is, “quite frankly,” a stickler for verbiage, it does make you wonder why WWE has so many times mischaracterized the process by which talent switch shows. The other move WWE will go to is hiring actors to come assist a heel in a feeble-minded skit that would struggle to elicit a reaction even out of a man with Tourette’s.

Think about this for a second: This is like being a head football coach and going into a game running four different plays on offense and three different plays on defense. That’s unacceptable, and the team that tries that is going to get steamrolled every time they take the field, kind of like how WWE is getting steamrolled by AEW in every metric right now: roster, booking, writing, talent relations, pay-per-view, and yes, now television ratings, too.

WWE is USC football, once a proud college football powerhouse that has lost sight of all the things that put it on the map in the first place. USC acted by making Lincoln Riley the new head coach, someone who will change the face of that team from top to bottom until it reaches its former glory. WWE will need a similar seismic shift, as well as a change in vision, if it wants to earn the respect of the casual viewer back, let alone the average wrestling fan.