10 Wrestling Grudges That Changed The Business
7. WWE Vs Its Own Audience
Now commonly shared thanks to the meme engagement accounts on X, the Triple H lecture towards basically all disillusioned WWE fans on the July 21st 2014 edition of Monday Night Raw has rightfully become infamous for how stupid and self-destructive it was.
You know the one - "me and my friend Mark are going to complain on the Internet" and so on. It might have been an in-character dig at fans yet again not getting on board with John Cena (or Roman Reigns, or Randy Orton, or anybody else they relentlessly and transparently forced on people), but it was cutting and spiteful and the company was eventually made to pay for it. The drop in viewing figures between 2014 and 2022 was a steeper one than television averages by orders of magnitude, and the slide was, ironically, only truly arrested by Paul Levesque taking over when Vince McMahon resigned in disgrace.
WWE will hopefully be less of an antagonistic company in the future, but the damage was already done. By chasing off millions, they created the call for their own competition. AEW exists because they WWE wilfully destroyed their own monopoly.