17 Ways WWE Has Changed Since It Was The WWF
11. The Rise Of Independent Influence
WWE had perhaps never been ideologically or commercially further away from its competition in 2002 - a name change could have spelled disaster in a different time, but by then, the rest of the wrestling world was a virtual irrelevance in Stamford, Connecticut.
The reality was marginally different - Ring Of Honor had launched just months before WWE “got the F out”, whilst NWA: TNA’s weekly pay-per-views kicked off just weeks later, but even implying that either could touch an organisation that had only just swallowed up another billion dollar wrestling enterprise was met with scorn internally and otherwise.
This extended to talent that shone on the smaller stages. Though Vince McMahon had one profited on the territorial experience of his 1980s signees, he had little interest in those that made their names on the independent circuit two decades later. It appeared an active strike against a talent - internet favourites were renamed and retrained as per the system, regardless of seemingly blatant detrimental effect.
CM Punk and to a lesser extent Daniel Bryan were outliers amongst many of their former colleagues until Triple H’s NXT opened its arms to the world outside the “Universe”. For better and worse, it has fuelled a different kind of boom period for the industry as a whole, temporarily reigniting motivations and money men from the ground up.