10 Anti-AEW Moves WWE Made Out Of Spite
3. Live From The Garden
New York City is WWE's spiritual home. Its base. The town in which Vince McMahon Sr. laid the groundwork for future success, which his son eventually transformed into an entertainment empire, taking the north-east territory national, global, then into a completely different stratosphere, business-wise.
That McMahon is now losing his grip on the city that Bruno Sammartino once made wrestling's capital is remarkable. AEW comprehensively outdrew WWE in NYC in September 2021, attracting 20,1777 fans for its Arthur Ashe Stadium show on the 22nd while WWE limped to 13,323 at Madison Square Garden 12 days prior. That around 2-3,000 of these were comped within the final few days (and that WWE lied the number up to 14,000) made it worse.
Worse still is that WWE had no intention of running a New York City show so close to AEW Grand Slam prior to the Arthur Ashe announcement. This would have been impossible, as the 10 September SmackDown show was only enabled when a Maroon 5 concert scheduled for MSG on the same date was cancelled. The window opened - and WWE leapt through it.
And their attempt at stifling Grand Slam by oversaturating the market with wrestling 12 days before Arthur Ashe failed.