Secret Power Players Pulling Strings In Wrestling Today
5. Barry Bloom
You’ll likely be aware of Barry Bloom, the shared agent of the Elite, at this point: the Young Bucks, when shooting supplementary content for social media, have made him canon in AEW. As first reported by the Super-J podcast of Voices of Wrestling, Bloom “hooked up” with Kazuchika Okada to land him a huge money deal with All Elite Wrestling. Bloom also secured the best offer for Will Ospreay.
He is the preeminent super-agent in professional wrestling, and has occupied that role for decades: he negotiated Scott Hall’s landmark deal with WCW in 1996, and facilitated Chris Jericho’s jump from WCW to the WWF three years later.
Always vast, his influence could become yet more pronounced as the war between WWE and AEW “rolls on”.
WWE wrestlers have been underpaid historically, and if they were aware of that, there was still f*ck all they could do. They couldn’t exactly earn more money elsewhere - until now.
Okada and Ospreay received better offers from AEW than WWE, which, it was widely reported, offhandedly mumbled WrestleMania as an incentive. WWE is quite disgustingly cash-rich. Now that the “Bloom deal” is embedded in the consciousness of pro wrestling, and those salaries are a big news story picked up by the mainstream media, will the key talents in WWE realise what they should be getting?
WrestleMania might be more significant than a story being finished this year: is it really more important than a retirement fund?