10 Wrestling Secrets Everyone Knows Except You
8. The Crucial Difference Between Booking And Matchmaking
WWE don't book long-term anymore.
They don't.
They barely book short-term, for that matter. They matchmake, and the difference is substantial even if it's wilfully missed by positivity trolls and their insincere side-by-side tweets.
WrestleMania 39, if WWE have their way, will feature Roman Reigns main eventing against The Rock in a match that has been fantasy booked to the point of overt manifestation for over half a decade. To this end, Reigns has won the belt and beat everybody like he's a 1999 Hardcore Holly pitch, but it's not as if 'The Great One's had some sort of single-issue Head-Of-The-Table agenda in the meantime. It's just a thing they've got and might be able to do. Kevin Owens Vs Steve Austin f*cking ruled, but if WWE could book it would have been even better thanks to the television being more about Owens randomly making jokes about Texas for six weeks.
There are exceptions (it appears as though the course is carefully being plotted to Becky Lynch/Ronda Rousey, and Seth Rollins/Cody Rhodes was smartly escalated and paced in terms of drama and stakes), but most angles are established on night one and then repeated through matches and the same four or five sh*tty Sports Entertainment tropes. Each wrestler has one or two traits, speaks like every other one, and then they wrestle.
The small moments we all love - and the moments lauded as "proof" WWE can still do this - are the only times they get it right out of 364 possible hours of original run programming a year.