8 Ways TKO Has RUINED WWE
4. Counter-Programming
WWE's counter-programming of All Elite Wrestling specifically in 2025 has been a new strain of irritating if you're AEW and sort-of funny for a while if you're a casual observer of events, but the whole bit is starting to wear increasingly thin as the year draws to a close.
It might objectively work wonders and TKO certainly won't care at all if an audience within a bubble considers the moves to be petty, but the discourse has been decided once and for all at this point - the larger of the two entities has started to come across as smalltime for the first time, with NXT in particular being made to suffer the consequences.
The height of this hit over All In: Texas weekend in July when, at the risk of the wrestling world thinking even for a couple of hours that the challenger brand might also have the capability of filling a stadium, WWE ran three events over the course of a weekend to reclaim the conversation. Goldberg's retirement, the second ever Evolution and yet another NXT PLE were fed into the counter-programming meat grinder, and all in vain; Hangman Page becoming AEW World Heavyweight Champion was arguably North American wrestling's biggest moment of the year, mostly because it was an extremely satisfying payoff to a longterm story - something that does a substantially better of job of convincing audiences not to bother with the competition.
The strategy hasn't even been WWE's boldest of the year...