10 Awful Things Wrestling Needs To LEAVE In 2023
2. Excessive Use Of Tournaments And Battle Royals
The abandonment of the rankings system was always going to allow lazy habits to creep in, and Tony Khan's fondness of tournaments and battle royals became a meme with which to mock him in 2023.
Battle Royals, even the best ones, are boring, messy and confusing in the first half. The excessive use of them diminishes the idea of achievement. If it's that easy to contend for a title, how important or elusive can the title be?
Beyond the Grand Slam Tournament of Champions in 2022 - and even that was a way, albeit a shrewd one, of not giving away big first-time singles meetings - has AEW ever booked a great tournament?
Khan signposts the final with his brackets every time, and pollutes the field with too many undeserving participants. He does this in order to avoid beating his big names. A lot of Tourney Khan's booking practises are designed to achieve that end.
The vast majority of mainstream US wrestling fans are millennials who have seen every version of a DQ or a distraction finish a million times, and haven't felt a damn thing for the heel 999,999 of them. The heel isn't a baddie anymore. The booker is a coward. It has been this way for years, and it is time for more clean jobs. Clean jobs forged Hangman Page's ascent to the top of the card.
The gravity of a real loss against a should - and can! - mean something. It means more than beating a washed-up Jeff Hardy - who had lost a video game tie-in match to Jeff Jarrett less than a month prior - in a quarter final.
Then again, perhaps they aren't so grown-up after all...