10 Major Lessons WWE Must Learn From 2017

10. Lose Your Arrogance

Jinder Mahal represented peak market dominance in 2017.

A foreign menace with a bodybuilding physique and plodding ring style, he, not Randy Orton, was Vince McMahon's idealised sports entertainer built from the ground up. In no other era but the Network age could Vince McMahon get away with pushing a performer as alienating as Mahal - but without PPV metrics prohibiting the push, he thought he could.

Mercifully, it was an abject failure.

SmackDown attendances shrunk. Though house show attendances remained consistent, perhaps stagnant is the correct word: they are nothing to brag about. The inflated circuit accounts for the revenue, as opposed to show quality or star power. Mahal bored the vast majority of fans and critics into submission through wrestling turgid matches devoid of atmosphere, and the underwhelming fan reaction to his retconned match with Brock Lesnar at Survivor Series finally removed the Modern Day Maharaja from his throne - in parallel, perhaps, with the treacle-slow tickets sales for WWE's reduced India tour.

Mahal contaminated SmackDown with tedium this year - an indirect symbol, if not a cause, of the emergence of the independent scene - and such intemperance is something even WWE's undiscerning, loyalist core demographic could not stand for.