WWE Vs AEW: The War Is OVER!

At Payback 2023, Kevin Owens bled all over the PPG Paints Arena in a match that resembled the prior week’s All In London Stadium Stampede as much as it did the loving tribute to the late great Terry Funk it was designed to be.

AEW’s Wembley Stadium showpiece was constantly beautiful to look at, but also beautifully weird in that it resembled the aesthetic we have all become accustomed to when WrestleMania rolls around. WWE can no longer sell itself as the only place wrestlers can walk out on the “grandest stage”, but the longer AEW promotes events of that magnitude, the more they’ll be held to the incredibly high standards of the market leader.

And they've been higher than ever on the PLE stage in 2023. Elimination Chamber, Backlash were white hot supercards that may linger longer in the memories than the Royal Rumbles, WrestleManias, Money In The Banks and SummerSlams they ostensibly played second fiddle to. The localised booking was borrowed from Tony Khan's expert 2021 playbook. Prior to CM Punk's controversial firing, Collision was perhaps the most warmly received regular AEW product this year. That it followed a WWE-like commitment to focusing on a smaller roster rather than Dynamite's ambitious but strained bottomless pit of talent didn't go without notice and praise.

There aren't any thrones left for AEW to singularly hold anymore. Cody Rhodes is as big a babyface in WWE as he was in the promotion he helped launch, but has already managed to do it for longer. Stables and tags are arguably more robust under Triple H than Tony Khan. The quiet Raw crowds haven't fully disappeared, but Dynamite doesn't exactly boast an all-night party anymore. In terms of the year's biggest pops, Bad Bunny's Backlash entrance smokes just about anything either side could have hoped to produce from their regular rank-and-file.

It cuts both ways too, sadly - both women's divisions reek of time-honoured latent misogyny and rank laziness and fluff content overload threatens the attention spans of both sides on a weekly basis.

The positives and negatives are eerily similar the more you drill down, which couldn't be further from AEW's origin story.

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