THIS Is The Exact Reason Wrestling Will Never Get Big Again

That's not to say AEW does not excel at the basics. The Jon Moxley/Eddie Kingston face-off from the Full Gear go-home show was an incredible piece of business; Kingston is incredible at projecting the very real emotion he feels, and between them, the two men arrived at the perfect plot device to drive the emotion and cast doubt over the outcome of the match: how could Eddie Kingston quit, when he promised his own mother he wouldn't?

This was the essence of pro wrestling: two alphas, one desperate, one dominant, selling you on a match with the promise of violence and drama.

But it was an aberration informed by something that cannot be replicated in fiction: Kingston's long, 18-year struggle to reach this moment. In this new world, in which real talent can no longer be ignored - because mainstream wrestling is no longer driven by an autocrat with a cosmetic bias - you won't see that again, either.

AEW does the heat angle, and does it very well. Taz will choke out Cody Rhodes, Mr. Brodie Lee will hospitalise him. And those angles are great, but they're of a classical stripe that, no matter how great they are, can't make all of this big again. You could not dream of creating a better babyface World Champion than Jon Moxley. He's the greatest. He is a man you'd love to be: loyal, hard, funny, authentic, drenched in earthy charisma. He came from nothing and only wanted everything to buy his mother a house. But for whatever reason - WWE siphoning the audience, the atomisation of pop culture making reach hard, if not impossible - he's only a sizeable draw relative to the industry. Perhaps it's a medium problem, and not a star problem.

We have heard the echoes of Vince Russo's vision on WWE TV for two entire decades. Here's something. The stans won't like it, but it's the truth.

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