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| Imagine if Kalisto were on twice a month instead of twice a season... Photo Credit: WWE.com |
The reasoning is simple; WWE signs too many wrestlers than it knows what to do with. The evidence is clear every week on RAW and Smackdown and to an extent NXT. While the developmental/prestige indie hybrid does the best job at showcasing the full roster every week, it has embarrassing gaps where wrestlers who either have name pedigrees like Kassius Ohno or who got substantial builds that just get confusingly dropped like Liv Morgan disappear for months at a time. On the main roster, the churn is worse, as the midcard gets a short shrift while a good portion of rosters gets relegated to Main Event if they get screen time at all. What show would have someone like Gran Metalik, Becky Lynch, or Luke Harper on any of its given rosters and not feature them prominently?
The problem isn't so much that WWE doesn't know how to build talent, per se. Look at the wrestlers the machine has gotten behind in the last two years that have gotten big over. Braun Strowman, Alexa Bliss, Kevin Owens, and to an extent, Roman Reigns1 are all credits to WWE's ability to portray the guys it wants you to buy at the top of the card. The company is laser-focused on creating top stars, which might be why so much of the angst behind wrestlers like Daniel Bryan and Cesaro not getting pushes is so heavy. You're only worth anything in WWE if you're in the main event, it seems. The problem stems when you have a large roster with no possible way of featuring all of them in a main event role, and you keep taking on wrestlers without releasing the proportionate amount back into the ecosystem unless their contracts run out or they ask to be let go.
What I'm trying to say is that it's an unsustainable model, not just for WWE, but for the entire wrestling industry. WWE is clearly signing all these wrestlers that it may or may not have a plan for, partially to try and hit it big but also because it's a capitalist strategy aimed at nerfing any attempt at competition. It signed Kairi Sane and tried nabbing Io Shirai as well, leaving STARDOM with only Mayu Iwatami as a marquee native in its main event scene. Any attempts at procuring the services of Niven and Storm would further damage the company. STARDOM isn't the only company WWE affects with these tactics. Ring of Honor, Global Force Wrestling, Lucha Underground, even New Japan Pro Wrestling feel the sting, if not from direct signings, from WWE setting up shop on the indies with indirect partnerships with SHIMMER and EVOLVE and in the United Kingdom, direct symbiotic relationships with PROGRESS and Insane Championship Wrestling. It's not like the American companies are going to compete with WWE any time soon or at all, but capitalism is a disease that makes the worst afflicted act with such paranoia and ruthlessness that any "threat" that diverts even a pittance from the larger revenue stream to them is worthy of rage.
The UK deal feels grosser than the climate stateside because it is actively shutting off workers who sign $20,000/year deals to remain "exclusive" to WWE-approved companies from the entire scene. It already killed the World of Sport revival, and any attempt at a promotion springing out of a hot British scene closer to the nascence of its revival than the peak to challenge WWE will be squelched before it really gets going. Meanwhile, that $20K of blood money keeps the top stars that do sign it like Pete Dunne and Tyler Bate in places where WWE can keep tabs on them.
This sponging of talent plus the anti-competition tactics put WWE in a position to maintain the hegemony it won when it purchased World Championship Wrestling in 2001. Said tactics would still be scummy in most any other situation, but they'd at least have a more tangible benefit for talent if they got market-fair deals and had their talents utilized in a constructive manner. The only wrestler who makes what or more than he's worth is Brock Lesnar because of the sheer money he makes and the paucity of dates he's required by contract. Everyone else, even guys like Reigns, don't make enough comparatively speaking to total revenue. They may get the star-focus that would give them comparable fame, not only in the wrestling world, but in the crossover purview, but again, the roster it's amassing is so big that the way it builds stars, or at least utilizes a roster (it's impossible to make everyone on the roster, no matter how well-utilized, a crossover star) is inefficient.
WWE sees itself as a television show. Critics of WWE think it should be more like a classic wrestling promotion. The truth is, WWE is both things and is also neither of those things if that makes sense. Rather, it treads a hybrid territory, one that it and WCW pioneered with the Monday Night Wars. It has elements of both, and I'm not sure it has perfected the art of both building a top guy and presenting a robust roster where it would pay to be a part of even if it was a bit part. The question then becomes how the company would go about doing this successfully. I don't have a concrete answer, but I do have ideas.
The first and best idea would be rotating the talent around on free television. Obviously, not everyone is going to matter enough to have a pay-per-view story, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be seen by a TV audience in the interim. RAW has no reason to keep Summer Rae, for example, off television for so long, especially since WWE tries to Steve Bannon itself about how it's so progressive for women in the biz. If that were the case, then it would have more than two angles concurrent, it wouldn't shove entire brands' women's rosters into a PPV title match, and the secondary angle on a given brand wouldn't be a humiliation play about how that performer loves hashtags. Cycling back to the main point, putting wrestlers on screen and in the ring for five minutes or more two times out of four during a pay-per-view cycle would do wonders for that wrestler's familiarity. You wouldn't have to scratch your head and ask where Kalisto has been when he turns up on RAW for the first time in like three months.
Of course, the best way to realize talent rotation is to load up on tag matches and play up alliances. WWE would be better served to actually have alliances for its babyface wrestlers first, but putting wrestlers together, even if it's out of convenience for a PPV cycle is not hard to do. The best example of this comes from New Japan Pro Wrestling, where nearly every card has big multiman tag matches where everyone gets some kind of shine. In that respect, people get to know guys like Toru Yano in advance of things like the G1 Climax or even before they get undercard singles feuds every once in awhile. One could argue that one of the most over wrestlers on that roster, Tomohiro Ishii, got to where he is mainly because he got to work so many tags on CHAOS teams with Shinsuke Nakamura and Kazuchika Okada so that when it came time for him to do things like the NJ Cup or the G1, fans knew who he was and rooted for him.
Not every warm body on the roster is going to become Tomohiro Ishii, but hell, you won't know unless you try. It certainly beats the hell out of leaving an entire class of wrestlers cold and on dark matches and Main Event tapings when live fans are still going to their seats and when the viewers at home at large don't even see them. Of course, NJPW is almost exclusively built on in-ring product and a touring model of house shows and pay-per-view style events. It's not a television show at all, so it can't be a hybrid either. WWE is so dependent on segments and skits, but again, that's where the idea of bit players and screen time come in. For example, The Simpsons has an ultra-diverse cast of characters, but nearly every episode centers on one of the core four family members, with occasional focus on a major side character like Mr. Burns or Krusty the Klown. That setup sounds a lot like the way WWE builds its narratives, yet WWE rarely has side characters with the same cache even among its "watch every week but still kinda casual" audience that Simpsons fans have with Disco Stu. Having segments that focus only one a star player or even worse, an authority figure, monologuing on the same beats every week not only gets tiresome, but it ignores the wealth of creativity that adding in different characters with different personalities can provide.
Basically, for this talent absorption to even begin to work out for WWE and its fans, it has to start thinking like a television show AND a wrestling company, not either/or. Obviously though, the brain drain will still affect other companies around the world, which regardless of how much benefit McMahon provides to his labor, although depressingly, it's more how much benefit labor provides McMahon, it'll still be bad for business on the whole. However, the indies sprouted up and thrived during a time when WWE was at its most inertiatic. Imagine how a vibrant, flourishing WWE might inspire more people to go into their local indies, how it might stoke a fire in wrestling that spills over to local promotions. It's certainly a "silver lining" argument, but WWE makes it hard to argue that anything it does serves anyone but itself.
Ideally, WWE would find some kind of equilibrium and let some wrestlers go when they start sucking up even more from other promotions. More accurately, wrestling would be better off if it were nationalized, but everyone knows that among all leftist ideals, radically reforming play-fighting is low on the list. The sad truth is it's probably not going to happen, but that doesn't mean one can't shout at the void to hope that it does. Hopefully, the heavy hitters from the Mae Young Classic will rebuke WWE at the behest of making the world scene stronger and thus making wrestling a better industry. I'm not sure how optimistic that hope can be, but until WWE does something about its worldview, I'm not sure you can do anything else.
1 - Say what you want about how you perceive Reigns through a traditional lens, and say what you want about the ass-stupid way WWE brass talks about him outside the confines of kayfabe, but he gets a reaction from everyone in the building, which is what you want out of a dude at the end of the day.