Why It’s Time For WWE To Play The Ultimate Trump Card

The million and billion dollar deals inked for Raw and SmackDown respectively in 2018 created this understandable narrative around the organisation that it was finally, definitively bullet proof.

A monopoly had been in place for nearly two decades, and Vince McMahon had spent that time not honing his product to satisfy the elastic desires of the wider wrestling fanbase, but converting his product into content. Speaking strictly in financial and analytical terms, he deserves immense credit for his foresight too.

One of the few anecdotes Bruce Prichard regularly shares on his podcast that doesn't sound like bullsh*t is the one about McMahon wanting his own Network as early as the late-1980s. Obviously the parameters were different and the market today is completely unrecognisable from the one back then, but the Chairman finally got his wish in the form of his tenner-a-month streaming service in 2014. "All WWE, all the time" is about as plausible a Vince McMahon motif as any of the ones we know are actually real, and fans were given a rough approximation of that just over 10 years after the company swallowed the North American landscape whole.

A product must be sold. Content is sellable. The difference may sound small, but it's enormous, and it was summed up in the Network from Day One/ Click here for new pay-per-views! Search there for old ones! Oh, can't find it, no problem. Oh, locked up. No bother, restart. Click over there for the archives of every other North American product you've ever enjoyed. Oh, it's crashed again. No matter, look at all that content! What's a sh*t product when there's so much of it to devour?

The careless philosophy was relatively risk free on an affordable streaming service. And applying it to Raw and SmackDown earned them the richest rights fees in wrestling history. But - in our best Limmy voices - at what cost?

CONT'D...