Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Thoughts on All Elite Wrestling

Neither The Elite nor the Khan's have any record of promoting wrestling full-time. Yet so far, they are claiming to have all of the answers to frequently unsolved issues in wrestling, despite being complete rookies at this game. These people are in over their heads already. Maybe they will succeed and maybe they won't, but I'd have a lot more faith if they had been running shows on the regular on a smaller basis to see how everything works.

They want to have healthcare, while letting people hold their own shows and possibly even be on other people's shows. Are they going to be okay with losing a star for perhaps up to a year when they inevitably get injured on personal shows or with non-contracted wrestlers? No one's going to think, "if we didn't allow this, we might have saved ourselves an injury"? And from what we've been told, the guys from top to bottom are going to be allowed to do whatever they want in matches, which is recipe for injuries as people will end up doing too much and taking unnecessary risks.

Next, let's talk about running less shows. There's a reason almost every wrestling company ever has ran a lot of shows. It's not because they necessarily wanted or needed to, but it's because more shows mean more money. Yes, WWE might have trouble making money off of house shows right now, but WWE has a whole host of other issues and this isn't WWE. Knoxville isn't considered a huge city in the US, but promotions in the past were able to run that 52 times a year and make a lot of money off of it. Obviously, I'm not saying they need to run somewhere that much, but if they can make money running off of smaller places multiple times a year, you think they are really going to say "NO"? I don't. And with the big money contracts they are talking about, they are going to have to be running, because there can really only be one or two big shows a year.

Next, they want female salaries to be equal with mens. I said this in another thread, but I cannot think of a single unsigned women's wrestler who is worth 6 figures right now. My best guess as to who that could be would be someone like Arisa Nakajima, who would clearly not be worth it despite being very good and even better than someone like Cody. And I and others have asked if these salaries are really going to be equal with people like the Bucks and Omega, and I think I saw Dave consider it a trolling comment, when it's not.

The women's roster is also something of concern. Who is really out there that is ready for the national stage for female wrestlers? Between WWE, ROH, TNA and whoever else, a lot of the better talent is already locked up. Yes, there's Japanese women, but places like Stardom are running on bare bones rosters as is. I don't want to see various joshi promotions be destroyed by talent losses and no one else should either if they are truly fans of the promotions.

I think they've gotten ahead of themselves so far and have put the cart before the horse. It's one thing to make big promises in private and not deliver, but they've made these publicly. And if they end up not working out, there's going to be a lot of questions. I really think they need to chill out and stop thinking they have the road to El Dorado on the first try.

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