AEW's Huge F*** YOU! To WWE (... & Why It Will Win)
AEW wins by securing the exorbitant rights fee that will position it as the second most financially successful promotion in pro wrestling history.
Levesque never did that with NXT, which in 2019 was paid pennies by a USA network that, desperate to retain a main roster brand in the next round of negotiations, did it the favour.
AEW earned a rights fee with a from-scratch great product. Levesque’s main roster product secured the Netflix deal, but all he had to do - after a head start longer than his interminable WrestleMania matches - was improve upon Vince McMahon’s. Vince’s main roster product was an atrocity, and yet, it was so fail-proof that WWE announced the FOX deal on June 26, 2018: the same date on which SmackDown ratings fell to a low for the year. (That episode, incidentally, featured the third and fourth non-finish WWE had booked across a 48-hour span.)
The bar Levesque had to clear - and he didn’t even need to do that, realistically, WWE was more than fine when it was awful - was buried deep into the core of the earth, just above Booker T at ‘Mania XIX.
AEW wins by actually forging successful relationships with prominent Japanese and Mexican companies.
Levesque’s long-held dream of global localisation is a joke. NXT Japan and NXT Mexico aren’t happening. They aren’t wanted there. Arena Mexico will go apesh*t to the level of a religious experience for the Blackpool Combat Club, but they don’t want a watered-down version of what they like because it’s got the initials ‘WWE’ on it. The Tokyo Dome received AEW’s Bryan Danielson as a demigod, but they don’t want NXT Japan. WWE has tested the waters for years only to be told, time and time again, not to bother. Levesque also tried to make inroads into the United Kingdom. One of the most highly-watched TV channels, ITV, launched a World of Sport reboot in the mid-2010s. That would not do, and thus, with ‘BritWres’ booming, the NXT UK brand was launched. It was a dismal - and, given its ruinous nature, cathartic - failure. The weekly show was the most dry, uninspiring, bland, utterly irrelevant bore ever produced under the WWE banner. This is stretching the conceit somewhat, but if there’s a potential superstar working what’s left of the “graps” scene, that wrestler will inevitably make it to RevPro - with which AEW is now loosely associated, offering them a quicker way in.
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