How AEW Saved (And RUINED) Wrestling

Garcia and YUTA's increased profile on TV has also - indirectly - affected the growth of their contemporaries, many of whom have cooled off.

Within months of their breakthrough performances, the AEW audience was asked to receive Wheeler YUTA and HOOK as their new cult favourite. Neither has reached those heights since. There is too much good wrestling in All Elite Wrestling for that to have happened. A good monopoly is still fundamentally flawed and unfair, and that's where we are at with AEW.

And because AEW is the epicentre of interest and buzz and conversation, the hardcore fan experience online absolutely sucks. The promotion is the only entity worth the discussion, and as such, every single thing it does it scrutinised to death. It is exhausting.

It feels like AEW or nothing at times, for the fans talking about wrestling and the wrestlers trying to get buzz alike. AEW summons a sort of fatigue that is hard to pin down. In almost every way, it's all a bit much.

The in-the-weeds millennial fan has always had something to cling onto if the big promotions failed them (or, in the case of Vince McMahon for the last 15 years, outright told them to f*ck off). Those who grew up in the mid-'90s flocked to the renegade ECW promotion. A decade later, with WWE almost solely focused on producing the most sh*tty "wrestling" television of all time, they latched onto Ring Of Honor, the X division of TNA, and later PWG. For the first time since Vince McMahon's expansion, there is no cool, emerging subculture. There is no playground in which a wrestler can flourish and become something close to the best version of themselves before making the next step in their career. And, if a movement does develop organically, AEW is almost certain to integrate it.

AEW is the destination of professional wrestling, but the journey to get there is all kinds of broken.