10 Reasons Wrestling Will Never Ever Top The 90s
6. Fierce Competition
When WCW showed its hand in 1994, by procuring the ageing but still popular fleet of WWF Golden Era headliners, the WWF was compelled to better its product.
The first direct retaliation - the New Generation - was a commercial failure, even if the in-ring body of work assembled by Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels did much to lay the foundations for the massively successful Attitude Era. McMahon's reasonable, company-wide edict of a youth movement didn't pan out, but he was on the right path. The WWF did succeed by pushing new stars, in 1998, but only after doing things the corporate WCW wasn't able to do. WCW had a Turner-enforced blade ban. McMahon in part supplanted him by allowing claret to spill and expletives to fly. At the respective peaks - and for a glorious period, at the same time - both products were unmissable, sharing an oddly symbiotic relationship from which the fans benefitted.
WWE in 2017 have created an environment in which it doesn't matter if nothing matters. It doesn't matter that Roman Reigns isn't received by live crowds as a top babyface. It doesn't matter that nobody buys Jinder Mahal as a main event guy. The company already has your Network money.
It doesn't matter because the competition is at once splintered and comparatively miniscule. There's nowhere else for the casual fan to turn over on a boring Monday night. There's no easy metric against which to gauge, but WWE's market share of the wrestling industry is so close to 100% that it's depressing.