10 Issues WWE Needs To Address In 2022
8. Brand Split
The brand split doesn’t add anything to WWE’s product - and simply doesn’t work. Keeping the superstars on separate rosters seems to serve only to deny the fans match possibilities they’d actually like to see, needlessly split up tag teams and factions, and generate embarrassing scenes in which champions swap belts to maintain their brand’s colour coding.
WWE remains convinced that we, the viewers, care about “brand warfare”, that we’d consider ourselves Raw or SmackDown ultras, and would invest in the idea of the red and blue shows facing off against one another. It makes so little sense; only a negligible number of people can possibly follow just one of the shows.
What’s more, in recent years the placement of the draft has turned Survivor Series - one of the Big Four PPVs - into a joke. We’re asked to believe that these wrestlers care deeply about the dominance of a show that, in many cases, they’ve only just been signed to.
In theory, the brand split should give the lower tier stars on each show the chance to shine, but that really doesn’t happen either. The whole notion could be scrapped and no one would miss it.