So this isn’t exactly a fantasy booking session. It’s a Pro-Wres Lab. I kind of did this before in The Agency System, Part 1. This isn’t part 2, it’s not the agency system. It’s along a similar line but not exactly the same thing. If I had to try to nail it down, The Agency System, Part 1 was kind of a fantasy meta-booking. What I’m going to do now is closer to a fantasy company strategy.
I don’t want to take a bunch of time to explain what the difference is supposed to be. Let’s just get into it.
The exercise here is to re-organize All Elite Wrestling into something that I think could actually compete against WWE. This is based on my idea that, in brief, “storylines are a con”. I haven’t fully fleshed this out yet in an article but I plan to. But to be a bit clearer, I think storylines have become the center of pro wrestling, to its detriment. Storylines cover over the exciting matches that are at the core of what makes wrestling a draw. Pushing storylines out as far as possible is the goal.
However, there are certain constraints on pro wrestling. The major one I’m going to deal with is television: how to keep the TV interesting if pulling the emphasis back from storylines. Luckily, we already know that matches (if they’re at least decent) hold more interest than any type of storyline or promo, so if we can produce good matches, that will work perfect. Of course, matches put on free television have to be balanced with those put on pay-per-view, or the strategy otherwise has to be figured out so that the number of exciting matches on offer is not exhausted too quickly.
Another consideration I have for this go-around is best said as two statements: “the system needs an operator” and “the system can’t teach itself”. In a self-aggrandizing/please-hire-me way, what I would love to be able to do is to write a proposal which would be able to work regardless of who is in the chair, so to speak. I’ve tried to explain the system in a way that would allow someone who might pick it up to understand what was going on and to direct it in the way that I would; not in a malicious or manipulative way, but in the sense that I believe this is how things should go in order to succeed.
But what will be at the center of this proposal is the idea that I can’t impart a booking style onto another person. The Agency System, Part 1 lays out something that I think could work (or partially does, anyway), but it’s very much “my” plan. It’s something that fits my particular sensibilities. What I’m going to try and lay out here is instead a strategy which can encompass different styles and booking patterns.
Essentially, my goal here is to try and lay out a way of organizing pro wrestling booking that isn’t a heavy reliance on storylines. While this might seem too narrow for a full company strategy, it is actually the cornerstone of the strategy. AEW as a full wrestling concern, including Ring of Honor and any other subsidiaries, should be organized around developing what it’s putting on screen and, specifically, what it is shaping as its big money/ratings matches.
To that effect, if there is any stylistic direction I would give for thinking along this exercise with me, it’s this: put everything into the context of the big money matches. One thing that “storyline wrestling” does which I think is counter to getting the most out of wrestling is that it demands that every match be made at (or near) the end of a storyline. The action has to go on for a very long time until something formal is put down that lets everyone know what the match is, and throughout that, the people involved in the match are usually locked down. Not everything should be a tournament, but booking needs to move from “storyline logic” towards “tournament logic”.
If you are booking a tournament for a legit sport, you still have to think about ratings, attendance, etc. There are always a few favorite teams and a larger number of teams that aren’t expected to win. What do tournament bookers do? They try to make matches. They look and see what would be an interesting final, and they try to put matches together which would ideally allow that final to take place. But, of course, being a tournament, that’s not fully predictable. While you can try to put only relative scrubs in front of the two front-runners, there are always other teams who can win matches when they “weren’t supposed to”. In pro wrestling, you can control this, of course, but the point is the overall outlook. Rather than just locking two people into a match, you can sort of project a match out into the future and then use the anticipation of that match, and the possibility of others disrupting it, as a draw for interest.
Similarly, you can put a match on the card weeks out, and then make the “story” moving forward about people angling to be the one who fights the winner. You can wrap the struggles of other characters around the money match you’ve put together. There are ways to build up matches that don’t rely simply on locking the participants into a “storyline”.
With all that said, let’s begin.
Men’s Division: The Main Show
I’m going to focus on the men’s division here because it is the company’s primary division. For reasons of roster depth, it’s possible to have a “full” men’s roster in a way it isn’t possible to have a “full” women’s roster, at least with who AEW has hired. I’m just clarifying this so it’s understood why the emphasis is going to be on men for what I expect will be the larger part of the article. I will talk about women’s wrestling specifically later but, in general, my comments on the men will work for the women, I just won’t do as full of a treatment. Again, I’ll get to it.
First things first, let’s get a roster depth chart going here. These are my personal rankings and they are probably a bit out of date (I just made the rankings but I haven’t been a close watcher in a while). They won’t be pivotal but they’ll be useful for illustration, so just chill out if Mark Briscoe isn’t quite high enough etc. I didn’t rate absolutely everybody and skipped some people who probably would have rated on this list if I really thought about it. These are also ratings of in-ring appeal: how exciting and/or impressive will their matches be.
- Rating 9 (top): Konosuke Takeshita, Will Ospreay
- Rating 8: Adam Page, Claudio Castagnoli, Kazuchika Okada, Kenny Omega, Kyle Fletcher, PAC
- Rating 7: Bandido, Brody King, Dax Harwood, Jay White, Jon Moxley, Josh Alexander, Kevin Knight, Kyle O’Reilly, Mark Briscoe, Matt Jackson, MJF, Nick Jackson, Ricochet, Roderick Strong, Samoa Joe, Swerve Strickland
- Rating 6: AR Fox, Cash Wheeler, Daniel Garcia, Darby Allin, Katsuyori Shibata, Lance Archer, Lio Rush, Mike Bailey, Powerhouse Hobbes, Shelton Benjamin
- Rating 5: Action Andretti, Adam Copeland, Big Bill, Bobby Lashley, Eddie Kingston, Hook
While there are no clear lines here, I would be trying to book wrestlers from rating 9 as my major stars who the whole year is built around, rating 8 as main eventers, and rating 7 as the “title crowd”. I’ll explain what I mean by that… right now.
Singles championships
If I imagine that my wrestling blogs are notorious, one thing I would be notorious for is saying there aren’t enough titles. This is always kind of sarcastic, but I do actually suggest it. Basically, I don’t think you need to have a ton of titles if you don’t want to. However, for this exercise, I actually am going to suggest them in a programmatic way. The reason is that this will give people tangible goals to fight over rather than needing to resort to making up flimsy excuses and insane-seeming attacks.
Before I lay out the main titles I have in mind, I need to warn you to change how you think about titles. Again, if you’ve been reading a bunch of my wrestling stuff, you’ll know that I’m kind of fascinated by the world of boxing titles. That’s a much better mold to think in here. With that said, let’s clarify how these are going to work.
Firstly, we’re talking all “heavyweight” singles titles here. None of these titles will be restricted in weights and none will be team titles. Given the fact that I’m going to suggest a lot of titles, an obvious question to me is whether these titles will be differentiated in any way.
The answer to that is no. There will be a vague tiering, but there’s going to be no effort made to really distinguish them. We’re not using special rules, tying them to specific events, anything like that. The point of these titles is not to be separately respected, it’s to form a competitive system. The only title that really matters is “the world title”. Most wrestling promotions seem to try to justify each lower title very explicitly. That’s just not going to be the case here.
So should you care about the lower titles? Well. No and yes. Yes in that they are titles, wrestlers will celebrate when they win, etc. Pomp and circumstance. It’s fun. But no in that they aren’t actually important, and the lower titles should absolutely not be protected. Vacate them, hold them up, have people hold multiple at once. The purpose of those titles is not to hold prestige, it’s to provide showcase matches (i.e. not squashes but matches that show-off possible new contenders for higher competition) and give a little juice to wrestlers that don’t hold the main title but might still headline an event.
Currently, AEW has 4 or 5 men’s singles titles, depending on how you count. The champions are, as of today:
- AEW World: Samoa Joe, 7
- AEW Unified: Kazuchika Okada, 8 (could also be counted as holding Continental and International titles separately)
- AEW TNT: Mark Briscoe, 7
- AEW National: Ricochet, 7
In my re-organized AEW, there will be six main men’s singles titles. By “main”, I mean that all of these titles are confirmed to have a place on the theoretical AEW pecking order, though their place is vague and indefinite. This six titles will be divided into two levels: world-level and national-level, each with three. The national titles will be roughly at the same level as one another. The world titles will theoretically at the same level as well, but one of them will be considered the “real” world title while the others will be considered “claimants” or “outer challengers”; these “outer challengers” are thought of as the best other than the real world champion, but matches between champions will generally be de-prioritized in favor of non-titleholder challengers. The idea here is that those holding “alternate” world titles should either become so dominant that they gain a unification match or to make a good showing before losing the title, at which point they’ll be considered to make a “challenge run” (booked to get credible wins before a title match is set).
Title names are important to me, in that I think their use as symbols shouldn’t be ignored. For that reason, I’m going to make a couple of truly fantasy moves here in order to set up my titles. The first move is that I think the AEW should buy the NWA. I think I said this in The Agency System, Part 1 as well. Let me see. Yeah, here is what I said at that time:
“Of course, for AEW’s sanctioning body, they could just invent one. They could. But because I have wrestling nostalgia, because I love the belt, and because this is fake, what I’m going to say here is that AEW buys the National Wrestling Alliance off of Billy Corgan and turns that into its sanctioning body. Several AEW titles would then become NWA titles (though we’ll talk about titles in a bit). Regardless of what you do, however, AEW itself cannot be the sanctioning body of the top title. One of the major elements of this fiction is that AEW doesn’t have direct control over the titles, as that puts the titles in play for negotiation.”
That all still holds. And the bit about the fiction of the sanctioning body is still somewhat true, but the main reason for it now is different. Before it was simply about the presentation, the notion of fictional negotiations. Now, separating the sanctioning bodies is mainly about helping it make sense that there are multiple titles occupying the “same space”.
One of the logical reasons that wrestling promotions try to diversify how their titles are actually handled is that it’s one company issuing all the titles. If there’s no real difference between WWE’s world title and the Intercontinental title, why even book different belts? In the case of the top title and secondary title this is somewhat simple to explain, but as you add more titles, it becomes harder to justify each new one (unless you really bloat your roster, which I’m not suggesting). To get around this, we’re just going to assume that there are three different sanctioning bodies with titles being promoted by AEW.
The NWA World title will still be presented as the major one; I do think the logic of the top title not “officially” being presented by AEW is still appealing. AEW will be the sole promotion but it will form the second sanctioning body. The third… well. I know I said buy the NWA to do the first one, but that’s because of history and all that. If you can find a third group to buy, do that, but you might as well just make it up; I don’t know of any defunct promotion that both has the cachet to make it worth the purchase and is not already owned by someone (WWE). One thing I do know is that unlike the previous go, we will not be using any ROH titles here in the main promotion; we’ll get back to ROH later, as that’s a big part of company strategy. For now, let’s just throw together an acronym I don’t think I’ve seen: ANWC, for American National Wrestling Council.
Here are the six main titles of a reorganized AEW, with some notes:
- world-level
- NWA World Heavyweight Championship: the real world title, always the top prize; if the best wrestler doesn’t have it, they should be the next contender unless they were the last; unified with the AEW World Championship
- AEW International Heavyweight Championship: AEW’s new version of the world title, place for the name more than the history
- ANWC United States Heavyweight Championship: the top ANWC title, considered its version of the world title
- national-level
- AEW Continental Heavyweight Championship: would not be associated with the Continental Classic
- NWA National Heavyweight Championship
- ANWC Territory Heavyweight Championship
If I was to place these titles on wrestlers, here is who I might choose (keeping in mind I believe Ospreay is currently out injured)
- NWA World: Konosuke Takeshita
- AEW International: Kazuchika Okada
- ANWC United States: Claudio Castagnoli
- AEW Continental: Samoa Joe
- NWA National: Ricochet
- ANWC Territory: Mark Briscoe
Booking rhythms
The first thing to lay out here is a broad outline of what the shows are going to look like. Since AEW doesn’t run house shows, we have a pretty simple separation of regular TV cards and supercards (or pay-per-views). If we’re doing a monthly supercard, then each one needs to be headlined by one of the following:
- a world-level title match
- a particularly hot title match for a top title in a division other than men’s singles
- a particularly hot grudge match
For regular cards, the main event (not the same thing as the last match) should be one of the following:
- any title match
- a top 10 ranking match for a world-level title
- a hot grudge match
The stipulations here are important: these shows must have a headline match of at least this quality and/or level. Each show has to feel like it is an event worth paying attention to. The best way to do that, in my opinion, is to structure each show like a real fight card: you have to a drawing match which is announced ahead of time. We won’t treat this as if we have a captive audience who will watch each week because they’ve built a habit. Some weeks will end up stronger than others, that happens. But at minimum, the shows should be built around these tentpole matches.
Beyond this, the main determiner of booking rhythms on a week-to-week basis is going to be how the main titles are treated. Unlike in storyline wrestling, the reorganized AEW would never permit the main titles to be defended on at-a-whim grudge matches. You can’t just sneak attack the champion and get a title match. All main title matches should be treated as “draw-ish matches”: they’re treated as if they’re supposed to draw even if they aren’t drawing-caliber. And in this situation, what that means is that the match is expected to be clean.
Remember: the storyline is no longer the draw in this type of booking, great matches are the draw. Any type of drama is meant to build anticipation for the match, but that work would be ruined if the match was disrupted for a cheap finish. To the extent that it should still be allowed (and this would vary by the booker), cheating should be involved in setting up big matches but not in deciding them. In most cases, there should be an emphasis on clean wrestling in the title matches. Any wrestler who can’t have a clean match just isn’t cut out for being a title contender in this system.
Storylines are a con. What are they a con for? They lie to you and tell you that storylines are the most exciting thing, and that way people who aren’t good wrestlers get to the top. But storylines aren’t the most exciting thing and never have been. Wrestling is the most exciting thing.
The second thing to take account of in regards to the titles and the booking rhythms is the schedule. The NWA World Heavyweight Championship (or the tippy-top title) will be defended roughly every three months, making four defenses per year. The other world-level titles will be defended every two months, and the national-level titles will be defended monthly. Only rarely should any world-level title be defended on “free TV”; their defenses should usually be saved for supercards, even if multiple world titles are defended on the same card.
What’s important about these cycles is that they will be providing the major opportunities to structure other booking. It lets wrestlers shift from focus to focus as a new goal at their level opens up. A world-level challenger might fail at one challenge, then simply work their way back into contention for a different world-level belt. The cycles aren’t absolute, either, and should be shortened or lengthened as needed to create huge cards and then re-shuffle the titles into a regular order.
Seasons and tournaments
I envision the wrestling year as being divided into a “season” and “off-season”. This doesn’t have exactly the same meaning as it does in regular sports, as it doesn’t (necessarily) mean that there is significant downtime for the promotion. I see this as basically being a way to organize pushes into something semi-systematic. I do want to leave space for bookers to do their own thing, but this general structure is meant to help facilitate a feeling of refreshing the roster each year.
To make this season thing work, I’m going to need two tournaments, and luckily AEW already has two that will do the job: the Owen Hart Memorial Tournament and the Continental Classic. The way the season will be laid out is that it will begin with the Owen Hart Memorial Tournament, held in February or March, and it will end with the Continental Classic from November to December. Between the end of the C2 and the beginning of the Owen is the “off-season”.
Each season, the basic question is this: who from the Owen is going to make it to the Continental Classic? That’s the throughline. Those who perform well in the Owen should be considered the front-runners in that race and will receive considerable pushes in the year. This doesn’t mean that other wrestlers will be forgotten, especially if they’re already being spotlighted, but this provides a justification for a yearly refresh on the focus figures. At first, the focus will need to be rather direct with video packages, promo time, and obvious pushes, but the hope is that after a few years, the audience will naturally associate doing well in the Owen with being a figure-to-watch, freeing up some TV time for the production to focus on others.
The first thing I would do for AEW in particular is to expand the Owen to 32 people. It would remain a single-elimination knockout tournament. Some non-AEW wrestlers should be involved in each tournament, but I think it’s especially important here, where lower-rung matches can be given out to indie-level partners as an incentive; perhaps even a win TV to help them get more over back home. Those AEW wrestlers who make it to the top 16 will be considered the top contenders for national-level titles, while those at the top 8 will be contenders for world-level titles. I don’t think the Owen comes with an automatic title shot, and whether it does or not, it won’t in this reorganized system.
Of course, we need to think of this not like game show hosts but like boxing promoters. Somebody wins a big-time tournament but they aren’t guaranteed a prize after that. Does that mean that the person doesn’t get a big match later? No! The winner of the Owen would almost always get a major title shot, probably a world-level shot, shortly afterward. It simply isn’t guaranteed because the psychology of this isn’t “I have won the event and this is my prize”, the psychology is “winning this event proves that I’m good enough to fight for your title, and you want to put on a big time match, so I am now a natural choice”. We don’t need to guarantee title shots explicitly and I think it dumbs down the presentation more than anything.
That said, world-level champions should not enter the Owen. That is going to be the major difference between the Owen and the Continental Classic. The Owen is meant to cast a wide net and declare a winner. The C2 is for pitting the best against each other and finding out who is the best of the best.
The C2 is so far a 12 person, 2 block round robin tournament. This is smaller than the “classic” size of the G1 tournament it’s modeled after, but I get it: times aren’t the most robust. You might not be able to put the heat you want in there to justify making it larger. But there are two changes I would make. Firstly, the Continental Championship is no longer affiliated, for the reasons I gave above. In the case of the C2, the winner has an almost guaranteed shot at the tippy-top title, the NWA World belt. Why do I say “almost”? Well, because this is a tournament that all the world-level champions are not only invited to but expected to enter, as well as the other main singles champions. After all, it’s the best of the best, and who can be better than the champs?
Which brings me to the second change: add a play-in round, where every spot is up for grabs in a singles match. This does two things. First, it lets you get more people in and around the C2 “scene”. Someone might go as a play-in loser for a couple years before finally winning their way in, which is a fun little story, and not the only one you could dream up around this. Second, it lets you knock out the champions if you want. I do think it’s important that champions go through the C2, both to prove themselves and to add prestige to the event, but there will certainly be times when you want to get out of that. This would let every champion participate without necessarily going through the grueling tournament itself.
Grudges and drama
So having said all that, is there a place for stories in this type of presentation? Yes, there is. Just like there’s heat between athletes in legit sports and rivalries that drive interest, there can still very well be hatreds and scores to settle and so on. The important thing is that these issues should rarely boil over so much that they actually disrupt things. If two wrestlers don’t like each other, they should trade insults when they can until it makes sense for them to get into the ring. Any other events that intensify or further the feud should come up in the course of regular competition. It’s not so much that sneak attacks and the like will be banned, it’s more that the way situations will progress won’t need anybody to kickstart a hate feud in the way that storyline wrestling demands.
The idea that the bookers and creative team really need to work out these tight stories with callbacks etc. is nonsense. Stories are a big part of how people follow legit sports, too, but they aren’t the kind of pseudo-cinematic stories that have been popular in American wrestling since the 80s. They’re stories about performance, prospects, opportunities seized and lost, etc. The Chicago Bulls don’t have to attack the Golden State Warriors in the parking lot for people to believe there might be a rivalry worth watching (again, I don’t know who’s relevant here, but hopefully you get what I’m saying).
So there is going to be drama, there will be grudges. As I’ve been laying out, big grudge matches can provide a way to have a high-level match that isn’t directly about rankings. Grudges and so on can develop through match results and interviews; it really isn’t necessary to use “angles” the way that we know them.
But will there be any storylines? Anything like the modern wrestling? Well. This is really more of a style question, and I think that if you’re smart you could run storylines in a way that doesn’t clash too hard with the match-focused structure. If I was to run this myself, I would plan on having one “storyline” each year/season. I think having those kinds of events does add some extra flavor. It can be treated like a big scandal might affect a legit sports league. But that storyline still wouldn’t be treated as the major draw. Ideally, any storyline should not “tie down” titles by creating situations where a champion holds a title without defending it so that they’ll still be champ when the story reaches the proper point.
I think it’s important to emphasize this point: storylines cannot be allowed to hijack the presentation such that titles etc. get held off for “storyline purposes”. Once that starts to happen, storylines threaten to become the draw again over putting together great matches. Storylines are not the integral part of this presentation, the matches are.
Longevity and youth
This note will be brief but I don’t want to forget it. Another thing that needs to be dealt with is how long wrestler careers are getting. In general terms, like in life and happiness terms, this is great. In terms of booking pro wrestling, it has had the negative effect of allowing promoters to hang on to old hands longer. We expect people to hang around in main events for 5+ years, decades even. Part of this is how the landscape is constructed now. There’s not so many places to earn a living outside of the big dogs, so everybody tries to hang out there as much as possible. That all makes sense.
The issue is that wrestling needs to be refreshed. Not just for the sake of getting young people in the door; there’s also the matter of having new match-ups. In team sports like basketball, while the teams rarely change, the players change often. And sure, like with wrestling, the tenure of top level basketball players has been getting longer. I do think there’s a different type of repetition fatigue that sets in when people are dealing with individuals over teams, however. That makes it more important in wrestling than in team sports that there’s new talent coming in all the time.
I will come back to this issue somewhat later, but for now, let’s say that there needs to be an unofficial longevity cap on wrestlers coming in. In most cases, the idea should be that if a new potential star or top challenger is brought in, they should be pushed up to the world-level in one or two years, and then spend three years maximum as a main contender. At the end of that three year period, if they have become a notable star, they can keep on at the top level; if not, they should get cycled down until they manage to get hot again, in which case they can be brought up briefly. Knowing that people are going to be cycled down, the leadership should work hard to continually discover, cultivate, and recruit good talent to replace them. But again, we’ll come back to this.
Sideshow Wrestling: Teams, etc.
My relationship with tag team wrestling is somewhat interesting, at least to me; while it might not be interesting to you, I’m going to tell you about it because it’s relevant. I love tag team wrestling. I’ve always been a big fan. Loved the Hart Foundation, loved the Steiners, loved Air Raid. When I came back to wrestling after a little break, I was drawn in mainly by the American Wolves and the Briscoe Brothers (RIP Jay), alongside Dark City Fight Club and some other teams of the era. I think tag wrestling is really unique and exciting.
And yet every single time I dream up a wrestling promotion, I end up putting tag wrestling off to the side. Why?
Well, I think it’s this: if I’m honest with myself, I don’t think tag wrestling and singles wrestling mix that well. It’s not that wrestlers can’t move from one to the other. The problem is that it’s really hard to juggle having a top tag division and a top singles division. If you have a great wrestler, shouldn’t they be high-level in the tag ranks as well, or at least fighting for those titles? But they rarely are. On the other hand, we’re often asked to believe that great tag wrestlers would forgo chances at bigger prizes. And then there’s something implied in that statement: the idea that a tag belt is never as big as a singles title to begin with. Why is that?
This is fodder for another article, but I think tag wrestling would actually be best handled as its own promotion. Maybe it wouldn’t have to be all tags, they could flip it to where singles matches are their sideshows. But I think it’s hard to combine the idea of having regular expert teams with singles dilettantes who challenge here and there. It should be fully a sideshow, to where any “steady team” are really just two singles wrestlers who enjoy tagging together more than shifting teams; or it should be the main draw, where everyone is expected to be in a tag team that lasts at least a few months.
The approach that I’m going to take here, for this reorganized and men’s-singles-focused AEW, is to make the team titles sideshows. That’s basically what it sounds like: titles that aren’t part of the “main show” of heavyweight wrestling. These titles will be fought over by the men but not as their main goals. These titles will usually be main eventing regular shows and appearing on the undercards of supercards. We can stick with the two existing team titles for now: the AEW World Tag Team Championship and the AEW World Trios Championship.
Other sideshow titles that could exist are a hardcore championship and a lightweight championship.
Women’s Wrestling: The Showcase
Technically speaking, women’s wrestling is also a sideshow, in the sense that it isn’t the main show of men’s singles wrestling. However, it’s clearly different from men’s team titles in that no men are involved. This presents a problem that I think most American-style “women’s divisions” have run into: depth. There is just rarely enough space in the division to keep creating interesting matches. WWE’s handling has evolved a lot, but there was certainly a time when there were just 5 or 6 women in their roster and 2 of them dominated.
I do think AEW has similar issues of depth, and I don’t think there is any easy solution. Every solution requires giving more time to women, but if that means on AEW television, it also means pulling time away from the men. This is a touchy conversation and, though I’d like to dodge it, I think that’d be too cowardly so I will give a brief opinion: I don’t think AEW has enough women under contract, or has the ability to hire enough top women outside, to support a full cable wrestling show. I don’t think it would be a good ratings decision to simply cut the current TV time in half and split it between the men and women.
While that is my belief, it’s not an ironclad belief; it’s not that I believe women have never outdrawn men or that they couldn’t do it again. I’m just laying that out as a justification for keeping the level of women’s wrestling on AEW at roughly the level it is now. While I do think that women need more space to develop real depth as a competitive-performance group, I don’t think the best strategy is to just expand their time on TV.
Instead, what I would suggest is setting up (or buying) a women’s wrestling promotion. This is not a relegation of women’s wrestling, though, I want to hold anybody off from thinking that. I’m proposing that what is presented on AEW TV is not considered “the women’s division of AEW” but rather “the top level of WAEW which is being shown on AEW”. Use the federation to hire 30+ women, to train them, and to build rankings and resumes and skills among them. The women who are mainstays on AEW TV would largely continue that role but would also interact with the lower ranks of that Women’s AEW promotion on their own shows. It would not necessarily need to be on TV as long as it could run regularly and demonstrate the idea that this isn’t just a small set of women trading titles but a living, breathing promotion which is only showing part of what it has in store via AEW TV.
Building the Scene: Ring of Honor and the Indies
As far as the company strategy goes, this is the heart of it. One of the things I have been repeating throughout is that there needs to be the influx of new blood, there needs to be people being pushed up all the time, people are cycling up and cycling down. That cannot work without a good base, and that’s something that the United States does not have right now. I don’t think anywhere in the world really has it. The US used to have it with the American indies, but WWE and AEW killed that. The thing is, while WWE was already rolling before the indies boom and absorbed some of it, AEW was the indies boom. What it’s done with that is a topic for another time, but what should be clear is that AEW should have nurtured that scene as best it could, but instead it’s let the scene die.
If AEW really wants to compete with WWE, it has to put muscle into building the American scene back up at the least. It needs two things from that scene: possible entry-level recruits which AEW can build up and potential experienced wrestlers for AEW to bring in when needed. The way that a successful AEW will work requires that there be enough good wrestlers that they can afford to do this cycling. If it allows itself to get stagnant, AEW will not be able to produce the kind of exciting matches and match-ups that will allow it to really compete with the giant. This is the very first item on the agenda.
There is a worry that WWE is going to pick up some people who are brought in by this. And that’s true, they will. That’s tough. They’re the big dogs in the situation, reputation-wise. They have the ability to pounce on any advantage that appears. But if you take that to mean that you shouldn’t try to create any advantages at all, you aren’t being helped by that, either. You protect yourself as well as you can and then you get to it. That’s all you can do.
Ring of Honor is the perfect foundation to do this from. While it’s been dormant for a bit, the brand is still the defining brand of the American indy scene. It still represents something. An active, gregarious Ring of Honor would be accepted, I think. And it could be the basis for a kind of alliance, clearly under the auspices of AEW, but one where Ring of Honor could meet and share resources with these groups on the level of a semi-peer rather than coming directly from the M1 AEW main battle tank.
There are two things you need with Ring of Honor. You need money and you need TV. If you follow Ring of Honor, you’re going to say that those things are hard to come by, but you’re thinking too deep, or too reflexively, or both. You need money but you don’t need that much money and you don’t need Ring of Honor to make money. You need TV but I don’t mean that Ring of Honor needs to get a TV show now.
To do this right, you need to give yourself a sizeable budget. I haven’t run the numbers myself but we’re talking minor league sports at least, anywhere from running a team to running a league level of money. This is on top of your operating costs for Ring of Honor as is. You also need to know that every once in a while, you’re going to have to cut 15 to 30 minutes out of your AEW broadcasts to do Ring of Honor and indie shit. Everybody is going to hate it when you say that but you have to commit to it.
The first part of the plan is to start paying everybody in Ring of Honor real well and to make it known that you can get paid if you go to Ring of Honor. You want to make it attractive to appear at Ring of Honor, not necessarily to sign a contract. The point isn’t to sign people to contracts. The point is to expand Ring of Honor’s network of friends. Get people in, show them around, make them feel like they would like to work with Ring of Honor again in the future. Don’t put anybody above your AEW people, obviously, but you want people to think I gotta do whatever I can to get on RoH’s radar.
Secondly, you want to start running cross-promotional shows, and you want to put your muscle into it. Spend money to put this shit on and to get people paid. Help bump up the numbers in these towns if you can. Send some people you do have under contract out and cover some of the costs.
Every once in a while, you need to feature these places on your TV. That is going to be the most important part. The first two steps are really about getting promoters and wrestlers comfortable with the idea of working with AEW. The main part is to feature them on your TV. Why? Because that’s what anybody is going to want more than anything else. That’s going to be the key, I think, to getting people to work with you. If you give somebody three minutes on Dynamite, that’s gold. That’s the carrot you should use to bring places into closer agreements with you.
Of course, WWE did a similar strategy as they came up, so the thought has to be there that maybe AEW is trying to steal wrestlers through this. And there’s some truth to that. But before I talk about that aspect, I want to point out that the goal for AEW here is to become real partners with these promotions, not to backstab them and run them out of business. The outlay of money from AEW might seem counter-productive or even underhanded, but really, the goal is to build up these promotions and their scenes so that they can contribute back to AEW. If a local wrestling scene is hot, it’s very likely that they’re also going to be excited when AEW comes into town, which means AEW is likely to make more money. Local promoters can also be brought in to promote AEW shows. You don’t want to buy places out or shut them down, you want allies who will work on your behalf.
Now to talk about the talent: yes, it is true, wrestlers who are particularly impressive are going to be pretty likely to be snapped up by AEW. But if AEW takes a far-sighted view, this should not be a problem. Firstly, in many cases AEW is going to want to make sure that talents are finished before they hire them, which means that local promotions will be able to get a good amount of time before AEW comes calling. Second, though AEW will be hiring some indie wrestlers, there are also going to be AEW wrestlers who are being cycled out. These wrestlers will need places to work as well, and if there is an AEW-developed indie circuit out there, there will be a great place for them to land should they want to keep working. So while these local promoters will be losing some younger prospects, they should be gaining good, experienced wrestlers with TV exposure in the interim. If the scene is hot enough, some wrestlers might decide to leave AEW before being “washed up” in order to explore those opportunities.
The Ring of Honor Dojo also needs to return and to become one of the top schools in the world, something which it curiously never achieved in its original run. The reason for this is that AEW needs a wrestling school, and it needs this school for two reasons. Number one, AEW needs a place to get wrestlers from where it knows that its wrestlers will be coming in with proper training. It needs a place for possible stars to come from. But more than that, number two, the AEW school needs to set a standard for AEW wrestling. While ideally AEW’s stars should come out of the ROH Dojo (or whatever school it establishes), it’s not imperative; what is imperative is that AEW’s midcard is based on the ROH Dojo. Put another way, while it would be nice to get a star out of the ROH Dojo, the actual purpose is to say that people need to be at least that good if they want to be a star. After all, AEW would like to push its own homegrown talent if it could. In order to get a push as an “outsider”, then, you have to be at least as good as the homegrown talent. The model for this is the NJPW Dojo, which was certainly the idea behind the ROH Dojo originally, but with AEW money this should actually be possible to achieve.
Finally, Ring of Honor needs to run a “best of the indies” tournament in the vein of PWG’s Battle of Los Angeles. This, and especially not being stingy about the winners of this tournament, will provide yet another major plank for boosting the indie scene.
Conclusion
The goal of this company strategy is two-fold. Firstly, it’s to give an expansive vision of what the American wrestling scene could be and the role that I think AEW could and should play in fostering it. Secondly, I want to lay out a mode of organizing wrestling that would be hostile to having storylines as the main draw. Maybe at some other time I will do a reprise of this idea focusing on a lower-level promotion, as not everyone is going to be able to support the number of titles that AEW can. But the main point isn’t to have titles necessarily, it’s to make sure that the focus is always on competition rather than letting grudges and drama take over the leading role on shows.
I’ll make this point more thoroughly in another piece I’m making, and I’ve made it to some degree in the past, but I truly believe that it is great wrestling that draws people in and makes them fans, not “compelling storylines”. If AEW wants to grow and even compete, it needs to put its emphasis back on great matches, not just on their supercards but on regular TV as well. People want to see something which is truly impressive. They don’t need “a story”. They can make their own stories. They need to see something captivating, like a truly excellent match. Through the creation of stakes and the removal of distractions, the goal of this strategy is to foster great matches and put them on for crowds to be thrilled by. It’s this thinking, and not “storylines”, which boosted the American indies despite the presence of the juggurnaut that is the WWE. Doing more of that is the path forward, not employing storylines that hamper the kind of matches that your talent can produce.