10 Steps WWE Took To Become The Most Toxic Wrestling Company Ever

5. To The Victor Go The Spoils

When the WWF won the Monday Night Wars, smug sewage poured from the pipes of Titan Towers.

By that time, fuelled by the star power of Steve Austin and the Rock, and a zeitgeist-grabbing philosophical shift, the WWF became a household concern once more. This was where the new big boys played. The old big boys were old hat - until McMahon required their star power for a short-term burst of lucrative nostalgia. The Invasion angle was a sad waste of a dream scenario, wasted purely to prove what the history books already confirmed: the WWF was the best and biggest wrestling company on the planet. The Undertaker treated homegrown WCW talent Diamond Dallas Page like he was an actual enemy soldier, and not someone with whom to make money. The downturn in business from the year 2000 indicts the strategy as counterproductive in the extreme, in the short term. Long term, the WWF halved the national wrestling audience. In the wake of the massively botched angle, WCW was perceived not just as an imitator, but an abject loser of an organisation. Even the biggest stars connected to it were devalued in WWE, purely to defend its apparent reputation as a bespoke star-making machine. Goldberg's 2003-04 stint remains unfathomable.

This gave rise to the culture in which prior experience, no matter how acclaimed, meant the sum total of nothing. Independent starlets like CM Punk and Daniel Bryan got over by accident, rather than design, because of it.

The WWF had won the pissing contest, for they had the biggest c*ck - which naturally led to them slapping it in the face of everybody for years and years afterwards...