5 Key Focus Areas For AEW Dynamite Year 2

Wins and losses matter in AEW. It’s a statement that is frequently repeated and reinforced by the showcasing of each wrestler’s stats during their ring entrances and on the company website, but is there actually any substance to it? Not really.

The majority of these records are heavily padded. The company’s YouTube show, Dark, quickly developed into a platform for squash match after squash match quickly after its launch, enabling the promotion’s contracted talents to rapidly up their win totals against unsigned performers. Destroying jobbers to build up performers is nothing new in the world of wrestling and is a necessity to avoid WWE’s infuriating 50/50 style of booking, but it shouldn’t be accentuated as an achievement.

Take somebody like Shawn Spears for example. Officially, his record for 2020 is 14-8, which looks somewhat impressive on the surface. Given that only five of those victories were on Dynamite and only a single one of them was against another full-time contracted talent, however, it isn’t fooling anybody when he emerges for a higher profile match.

Either de-emphasising or changing the way that the records are presented would go a long way to giving them more significance. There is no simple solution, as an action such as splitting Dynamite and Dark statistics would highlight that many members of the roster do actually lose a lot more of their meaningful matches than they win, but having numbers for numbers sake isn’t really doing anybody any favours either.