10 Secret Clues That Wrestlers Were Destined To Fail

By Michael Sidgwick / December 26, 2024

CM Punk and AEW felt like the perfect match.

Punk despised the WWE system. WWE had never treated him like the wrestling genius he was. He wasn’t quite tall and tanned and defined enough. He was too outspoken. He wasn’t theirs.

AEW, conversely, treated him like the biggest star in wrestling, a mystical legend. AEW was a company that would allow Punk, a perfectionist with a very high opinion of himself, the freedom to cut his own promos. To hand-pick his own opponents. To even write (or contribute heavily towards) his own storylines.

In August 2021, it almost felt as though the creative utopia of AEW had been founded for the express purpose of one day summoning Punk back to pro wrestling.

He was never going to Impact, was he?

Every condition had to be met, and in the wake of the Pipebomb promo through which fans demanded or at least could reasonably expect change, ‘The First Dance’ felt like the culmination of pro wrestling’s great rebirth - a moment fate itself conspired to make happen.

What could possibly go wrong?

Or, more pertinently: was it ever going to go right…?

10. WWE Sting

In WWE, Sting was introduced as a vigilante intent on saving WWE from the toxic, self-preserving Authority stable at Survivor Series 2014.

At WrestleMania 31, when the Icon finally hit the ring, his match against Triple H was reimagined as a Monday Night Wars retread. WWE won again. Those little pubes from Dubya See Dubya just couldn’t get it done.

To many fans, this was inexplicable. Certainly, the idea that Sting would team up with the nWo was bizarre. But the result, the pivot?

It shouldn’t have been inexplicable. The “secret clue” here was the year 2013.( And the year 2001.)

The Authority was an ostensible heel faction that actually reflected WWE’s real values and, as such, offered no respite to the audience*.

*unless threatened with an embarrassing hijack, of course.

WWE did not consider the Authority heels! For Christ’s sake!

Eventually, the group faded, ended not by some heroic people’s champion, the scourge of the McMahons, but rather Shane…McMahon. Sort of.

They mostly just gave up on it.

9. Mercedes Moné

Mercedes Moné is a fantastic pro wrestler. She is not CM Punk.

Tony Khan, as he is prone to do, overthought her presentation.

She arrived in the exact same way - a hometown building sold out on a “rumour”, bespoke event name, extended in-ring interview - but as nice as it was, her “Thanks for coming out” speech was hardly an iconic promo people had anticipated for seven years, if they’d even allowed themselves to think they’d ever hear it.

Suffering immediately from the curse of comparison, Moné was programmed with Willow Nightingale, and while their Double Or Nothing match was ultimately excellent, Khan split the investment of the audience. Matching Moné against the massively endearing Willow was a dumb idea, and when Moné naturally failed to get over at her expense, the resulting heel turn felt like a desperate pivot, the likes of which hardly fuels confidence in the process.

The women shared history - Moné had in fact shattered her ankle in a match against Nightingale - but, in picking this up, Khan again overestimated how much people care about inter-promotional business. Emphasising strict continuity over a new game-changing direction underscored that TK isn't an amazing promoter.

Yes, AEW drew a house - the second biggest on TV all year - but immediately presented Moné as just another wrestler.

8. WWE New World Over

The New World Order debuted in the WWF on February 17, 2002.

By March 17 - 28 whole days later - Hulk Hogan was a babyface.

This warp-speed development was very much of its time, and it happened because the nWo was never going to work. Everything was put in place. The premise was logical, by pro wrestling standards: like WCW before it, the WWF worked out a way of justifying/financing the interloping group. Vince McMahon’s loss of full control to Ric Flair forced him to bring Hogan et al. in as a last resort.

Almost immediately though, the idea that the nWo could revolutionise the business once more had evaporated. Their presence wasn’t even an evolution of WWE’s episodic storytelling; in attempting to maim the Rock in a signature goofy vehicular homicide angle, the nWo was indistinguishable from every other top heel of the Attitude Era.

Scott Hall had misbehaved on day one, so there were more significant reasons why the original version of the group was doomed - but in quite the irony, the faction that for all intents and purposes was the WWF in 1996 was too much in the vein of the WWF six years later.

7. The New Elite

The New Elite started very promisingly.

The introduction of Kazuchika Okada was deftly foreshadowed when the Bucks fined Eddie Kingston, who paid it upfront before Okada beat him down, allowing the Bucks to mimic his famous entrance by raining the bills down upon him.

However…

When the Bucks renamed the Meltzer Driver the TK Driver - before Okada’s introduction - it seemed to be a cute way of building their new gimmick as obsequious middle management types.

As it turned out, the Bucks had foreshadowed the dismal angle in which they hit Tony Khan with the move and recruited Jack Perry into the New Elite stable. This should never have happened; the angle was another step AEW took towards becoming every hackneyed cable TV U.S. wrestling show you’ve ever seen, and what’s worse is that AEW didn’t even commit to this risky new direction.

Representatives of Team AEW feuded with the new Elite for no discernible reason other than to make calendar-mandated Anarchy In The Arena and Blood & Guts matches happen. There were no stakes; despite losing the latter match, the Bucks held onto a level of power that was never adequately explained.

6. Daniel Bryan

To underscore just how awful WWE was in the late 2010s, the company brought the best babyface of the century back in 2018 - and botched his run so badly that Daniel Bryan volunteered to turn heel in under 12 months.

It felt doomed to fail immediately when, during his in-ring comeback against Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn, he was stretchered out. This was pitched as a means of building sympathy, but his partner at WrestleMania 34, Shane McMahon, fought through diverticulitis on the night. Contrasting a hackneyed worked injury with a very real condition conspired to babyface the son of a billionaire. This was a red flag. WWE’s priorities were, as ever, f*cked.

Then, Bryan was programmed against Big Cass (who, while superb as Big Bill, wasn’t particularly good at the time).

Oddly, this feud had a bit of AEW about it before AEW existed. It was premised on the idea that Bryan and Cass had both been cleared to compete on the same day.

Nothing more than a cute coincidence, this underscored which party pushed hard to bring Bryan back into the ring - and that party was not WWE.

5. Scapegoat Jack Perry

Jack Perry was knackered either way, since the New Elite was yet another upper midcard narrative accommodation as opposed to a new dominant stable around which every storyline orbited.

Perry specifically was destined to fail because, by 2024, AEW fans had long since tired of the CM Punk drama that had ravaged the company.

Casting Perry as a man left a nihilistic husk in the wake of Punk’s run was a terrible idea because the portrayal was emblematic of the state of the promotion. Fans wanted to escape; one good night in Chicago could not justify the run. The response to AEW airing the footage from the Punk/Perry altercation at Wembley Stadium was an indication that it would not work. People wanted to move on. Even if Perry was a revelation in the heel role, the constant cloud would have hung over everything.

Perry was no revelation.

It was an awful year for Perry, who had somehow contrived to sit under the learning tree of Christian Cage for two years and not learn a note of his crafty rodent heel persona.

4. The “Game-Changing” NXT Call-Ups

Right, these wrestlers were destined to fail because they worked for NXT when Vince McMahon was running the main roster.

They were extra-screwed, though.

A group was brought up on a desperate promise to make WWE better; this followed the onscreen apology Vince McMahon couldn’t actually bring himself to make in December 2018.

This group comprised Lars Sullivan, EC3, Heavy Machinery, Lacey Evans, and Nikki Cross.

Sullivan was a trademark Vince mutant; EC3 a telegenic guy who could talk and that was about it; Heavy Machinery were suitably wacky; Lacey Evans was a blonde with very little talent and even less training; Cross, at least, could go and had actually earned the spot.

These were not well thought-out call-ups; they were very obviously a group that Triple H had thrown together, knowing Vince was predisposed to “getting” them, and slipped Cross in on merit. That there were six of them was a giveaway; if Vince had given half a toss about any of them (he didn’t), he’d have carefully mapped out a character arc for each.

Instead, he didn’t let EC3 talk - which was a bit like debuting Alicia Fox and not letting her do a Northern Lights suplex.

3. RETRIBUTION

WWE was beyond desperate in 2020.

In promoting cinematic matches and launching Raw Underground, the company wanted to be Matt Hardy and the UWF-i all at once. These two things don’t go together. The only thing Matt Hardy knows about worked shoots is getting his fans to call Lita a slut.

WWE also wanted to reflect society, or some b*llocks, hence the debut of the RETRIBUTION faction. Presented as antifa-coded disruptor types, the group was hyped by WWE through media channels ahead of its debut, and closed SmackDown with their formation angle.

Very little in this era of WWE was built to last - Vince McMahon almost certainly forgot about half the sh*t he booked - but they at least pretended that RETRIBUTION was a big deal you should care about.

The faction arrived by “laying waste” to the Performance Center, but in an early tell that this was yet more half-baked slop, the brand new ThunderDome was left completely untouched by the guys who supposedly wanted to destroy the entire company.

2. The Alliance

The Invasion was never going to work without the few wrestlers who emerged from the wreckage that was WCW with a theoretical star power intact. Goldberg, the nWo, Sting: people wanted to see those guys.

As literal as the name was, people didn’t want to see Mike Awesome. If they had taste, they would have, but alas. WWE should have withheld the idea for a year, signed those names, re-debuted Nitro, and then built inter-promotional matches when the brand had been re-established.

Still, the idea was so intoxicating that fans were very willing to go along with it; to this day, the Invasion pay-per-view remains the most purchased non-Big Four event in the history of the promotion.

Weeks before it, though, Alliance wrestler Mike Awesome captured the Hardcore title. He was made to celebrate winning a title held by luminaries such as Al Snow, Gerald Brisco and Godfather’s Ho like he’d just won the main event of WrestleMania.

This idea, that what remained of ECWCW should go that daft for the WWF’s least prestigious prize, was a chilling omen that they were considered worse than sh*t.

1. CM Punk

CM Punk argued, in his now-infamous interview with Ariel Helwani earlier this year, that Tony Khan isn’t an effective boss. Per Punk, Khan would rather be nice than run a business.

Not to accuse Punk of being a hypocrite, or anything, but he didn’t always treat AEW with the utmost seriousness.

Punk was a huge draw for AEW, and his legendary programme with MJF supported his case that he was primarily concerned with telling money-drawing stories.

Still, the signs were visible, if you looked hard enough.

Punk was very happy to be there, and built many early matches around a body slam - as if to flex that he could make the little things matter, unlike the movez guys. There was an air of breezy novelty to his work, and elsewhere, he treated TV matches like he was trying to get over with Bret Hart rather than the audience.

Here’s a question: can you imagine Punk working his first (or indeed any) WWE match wearing his “longbois” tights?

That was a weird experiment; in his very first match, Punk seemed to treat AEW as a place in which he could do as he pleased. The smiling face, the self-indulgent experiments: it felt half the time like Punk was returning to a hobby as much as he was returning to a business.

The entitled, above-it-all attitude with which Punk treated AEW, to everybody’s detriment, was evident in September 2021.