Predicting What The Entire Wrestling World Will Look Like In Five Years
4. What Does Women's Wrestling Look Like?
Because it doesn't look particularly great now, in North American anyway. The joshi scene will continue to flourish. The popularity of the '80s and early '90s will never be recaptured, but the quality might just get bettered at long last.
In the US, WWE has established something approaching parity, but the division is mostly a mess in which everybody beyond the select, protected few is banished to the sh*tty 50/50 churn of a tag division in which it is law for the champions to lose every single non-title match.
Frankly, little will change; if anything, looking at the hyper-sexualised recruitment policy of NXT 2.0, in which Roxanne Perez and Cora Jade are rule-proving exceptions, the division will regress further.
Tony Khan books the women's division like he does the men's, and it absolutely doesn't work. The established star versus upstart competitor device is a failure in the former because the emerging acts aren't anywhere near as promising or refined, and that has everything to do with the historical internal misogyny of the entire industry, which is lucky to have as many women as it has willingly enter it.
A revolution is far more likely to happen in one company more than the other, and while it would appear that AEW has located several cheat codes to marginalise the time allocated to the division - the Jade Cargill squash, the Serena Deeb Rookie Challenge, the Owen Hart Tournament squash qualifier - the volume of complaints will become too loud, and Tony Khan, using Women of Honor in the background, will adapt his philosophy to book more all-star women's matches on a similar principle to peak NXT. This is very, very optimistic, on current evidence.
But something major will transform everything...