10 Things That Absolutely SUCK About Wrestling Today
2. The "I Might Be Leaving" Storyline
The 'Bidding War of 2024' storyline - which has been de-emphasised of late - works. In isolation.
The idea is to depict MJF as the entitled d*ckhead who hates and abuses the thing you all love: All Elite Wrestling as an entity. AEW is the babyface promotion that saved your very fandom; positioning a heel against it is a shrewd move. It makes sense.
What doesn't make sense is a babyface doing it for no storyline or heat-building reason beyond creating a very exhausting conversation.
When the Wrestling Observer Newsletter released their fan-voted awards, AEW's official Twitter account congratulated the winners that are contracted to the company - with the exception of FTR. Dax Harwood fired off a series of tweets expressing his unhappiness, which followed a long period of teasing his exit from the company. Did you know his deal expires in April?
Wrestling Twitter is a bubble. The creeping anti-FTR sentiment online was not echoed in the Chase Center at Revolution. FTR returned and were massively over. They generated the loudest pop on the subsequent edition of Dynamite.
Did Dax orchestrate that surprised reaction with his social media activity, or does nobody care about his tweets?
Ricky Starks also mentioned on Dynamite, before being attacked by Juice Robinson, that he doesn't know where he's going "next". This stuff only matters to the chronically online. It's all a pointless, tedious exercise at best; at worst, these wrestlers are very slowly chipping away at their following.
This is a symptom of a far more significant problem...