Triple H's WWE Vs. Tony Khan's AEW: Which Is Better?
6. Atmosphere
For years, the core WWE base had been conditioned to think of wrestling matches, even those who won or lost them, as secondary to the glitz of it all.
Those fans who truly did care appear to have migrated to AEW. The timeline supports this theory, as does ratings data. WWE haemorrhaged viewers at a faster clip than most cable properties as streaming services rose to prominence. Those lapsed fans were drawn to the AEW movement.
By 2019, after the one last push to get Becky Lynch over the line at the expense of office favourite Charlotte Flair, WWE fans seemed to stop caring. They did protest the finish to Hell In A Cell '19, yes, but by Extreme Rules '21, there was no such outrage when Finn Bálor was humiliated. It was just another thing that a more than respectable if tepid crowd were happy enough to watch, passively, for whatever reason. The disenfranchised vocal fans who truly care enough to generate a white hot atmosphere, most of the time anyway, went to watch AEW shows. It's a simple hypothesis, but the decibel levels bear it out.
Clash At The Castle was deafening - as someone who attended both shows, it was actually louder than WrestleMania XXX - and the big PPV matches command a rowdy atmosphere, but the TV is absolutely dead to a remarkable extent. Watching Raw in 2022 feels far more close to 2020 than even 2016.
When AEW has a quiet show, it's far from the norm. It's a shock. It even sparks major podcast debates and think-pieces about the state of the company.
The best AEW shows are celebrations of the form that play out in front of wild scenes; WWE shows, most of the time, are almost eerily quiet.
Winner: AEW