10 Questions WWE Shareholders Should Be Asking Vince McMahon
"Just looking at the balance sheet here. What's this 'NXT UK'? Is that a typo?"
Your investment in WWE is emotional.
Were you to ask Vince McMahon a question, it would likely centre on the creative process, because it's so inscrutable, and that's what you care about. OIBDA is that song you skip past on the White Album if you have good music taste.
Why do you script promos on behalf of your talent? Haven't 20 years of progressive decline taught you that, perhaps, it's not entertaining when sh*t-kicker combat athletes use motivational speeches as if starring in a Saturday morning Peter Engel production? What's the deal with Baron Corbin? Do you hate Dolph Ziggler, or not? Because you seemed to really hate the guy when we liked him, and then you booked him in two consecutive WWE Title matches last year. It's like you waited for us to lose interest. Why didn't you strap Braun Strowman before his knees went? We liked a gigantic man mountain, for once! He was fun!
Or perhaps your question would centre on his hilarious eccentricities. Do you really not fancy Asian women? Do you really not know what a burrito is, you goddamn space cadet?
But what if it were financial?
And what if those with a financial investment had a modicum of product knowledge?
10. Why Are You Willingly Losing My Money On NXT UK?
NXT UK is and exists to be a money-losing proposition by spiteful design.
There was an impetus to form NXT UK. WWE faced a stern challenge in an established stronghold, and WWE weren't to know that World of Sport would fail through its strange, throwback vision. But WWE did not wait to gauge the temperature, or to use its vast resources to negotiate a similarly strong deal of its own; it used those resources to immediately stifle and homogenise a market that produced far more stars and drew bigger gates before it was monopolised. That is the great indictment of NXT UK; it's ostensibly a developmental programme that has not, in just under two years, developed a single talent to a level of fame they had not achieved without the backing of the machine.
As a shareholder, this is my money. It is being reinvested into a project that has a minimal at best chance of making a return as a brand unto itself; furthermore, it does not even function as a development programme - i.e., something that will finance itself, indirectly, when the stars recruited to it become marketable stars on the core brands. Flagship performer WALTER has no interest in working outside of the UK. Pete Dunne and Tyler Bate were bigger stars in 2017. Jordan Devlin's profile has grown as a result of his well-received OTT run, not his diminished NXT UK career, which is damning. He'd be more over were it not for NXT UK.
It isn't a case of "Great, more of NXT UK's Jordan Devlin!" but rather "Great, Jordan Devlin is moving away from NXT UK."