Aimless Content: The Cost of 50/50 Booking
Long ago, WWE decided that wins and losses don’t matter. From their perspective, the game of professional wrestling has changed. It’s not hard to see their point of view: from their end, merch sales are up, WWE Network subscriptions are steady (and/or increasing, given the time of year) and their company has signed the most lucrative TV deal in its history, one that likely influenced other major content providers such as the UFC when negotiating their own TV deals. If you’re on top in the WWE, life is demonstrably good. Executive Vice President Triple H defended this booking as well during an interview with ESPN.
“When somebody goes, ‘Well, you just can’t get people over with 50/50 booking,’ [I’ll always say] ‘Oh, I’m sorry, how’s your territory coming? Because this one seems to be doing pretty good over here’,” Triple H said. “We just had the largest WrestleMania in history. People talk a lot of smack about ratings and things, but they don’t understand all of the dynamics of everything we do. They don’t. They sit on the internet and they read one thing and they give their point of view.”
All respect to The Game, but this is a non-sequitur. When people criticize 50/50 booking, they’re not arguing that the company is not financially solvent, or so large as to be the only significant player in the game. On the contrary, most fans know exactly what WWE is. Good ratings and a large Wrestlemania aren’t what fans are debating or complaining about. Their complaints stem from the long-term cost of 50/50 booking, not in terms of ratings, merch sales, or network subscriptions, but on the overall product presented by the most ubiquitous company producing wrestling. In other words, they’re not complaining because they’re not fans; they’re complaining because they are.
With that in mind, I admittedly don’t understand the dynamics of everything the WWE does. I have never worked in the wrestling business. I have never promoted, trained, or booked wrestling. I have, however, watched hours of wrestling, both in the WWE and outside of it, and what I’ve learned is that there is a cost to 50/50 booking beyond, forgive the pun, the business side of things. That’s why I think an important distinction needs to be made in this ongoing argument. I don’t wish to argue with Triple H (or anyone for that matter) about the financial solvency of WWE as it promotes wrestling using 50/50 booking.
I’d like to talk about why the product is boring.
Super Showdown, WWE’s massive show in Melbourne, Australia, will feature headliners The Undertaker (with Kane in his corner) vs. Triple H (with Shawn Michaels in his corner). This is not 1997. The combined age of the men in the ring will be over 200 years old. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Professional wrestling, when done correctly over the span of a career, can have longevity that simply can’t exist in the real world of sports. Sure, you’ve got your cautionary tales about a riskier in-ring style, but for guys like Taker and Triple H, longevity has been made possible by wrestling a more conservative style over time, without sacrificing much in the way of entertainment. You can be a draw, and a big one at that, for years after your athletic prime. This is both a blessing and a curse.
In isolation, there’s nothing wrong with bringing back legacy superstars at big events. It’s fun for the fans to see their heroes of yesteryear; it’s fun to see one-off “what if?” matches. Admit it: it’s fun to hear the iconic entrance music go off one last time. This is all well and good, except that — combined with the problem of 50/50 booking — new guys never seem to be able to get over. I actually think the legacy wrestlers are less of a problem for younger talent than 50/50 booking, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that when WWE needs a cheap pop, they call Undertaker, march out Triple H (and his pop has dwindled, in my opinion, as of recently) or shovel truckloads of cash at Brock Lesnar.
It’s not that new guys can’t get a big reaction. Look at Finn Balor. Shinsuke Nakamura. Bobby Roode. Asuka. Hell, even Tye Dillinger. Look at the entire roster of NXT, and the reactions they receive at Takeover shows. Look at how they’re (initially) received when they arrive on the main roster. Go further back to one of my favorite surprise entrances of all time: AJ Styles at the Rumble. While some of these players have gone on to be big names, most are floundering, currently caught in mid-card purgatory. Even AJ Styles, one of the most over champions of the current era, was very nearly buried early on in his WWE debut. And who did the burying? Legacy guys like Chris Jericho. Don’t get me wrong: I love Jericho. But at the time, it wasn’t certain that Jericho would even stick around, let alone develop The List and Best Friends gimmick with Kevin Owens that made them both so endearing. He was an older guy perhaps on his way out, and AJ Styles — who is luckier than most younger talent that arrives from NXT — was a talent nearly squandered.
To be fair to the older guys, many have the old-school mentality about giving younger guys “the rub.” Most will take a pin to put another guy over. Most have been doing just that for their entire careers, so the majority of the problem doesn’t rest with legacy guys who, when called upon, will do the right thing and make a young guy look good. The problem is the follow through on the part of the WWE, the way young/new guys are booked after getting the rub, as it were.
Let’s be honest. Nowhere else in the world of real sports can an athlete or team who is .500 be expected to draw money, as they say. You don’t imagine a .500 team, or more aptly, an 8–8 fighter as a juggernaut. The guy who’s 8–8 would be lucky to even be on a serious roster, let alone a contender. To argue that wins don’t matter, as Triple H has, is absurd. It assumes that the viewer neither takes note of wins versus losses nor cares. Neither is true. Most fans may not log wins and losses week to week, but it’s impossible to not notice long-term trends in how characters are portrayed when they lose every other match. It may be true that wins and losses don’t matter in the WWE — or more specifically to the WWE — but they still matter, especially if you want to build a character within the framework of a physical contest. If all characters lose one out of every two matches, you’ve got a very mediocre roster of “competitors.” With those kinds of numbers, the UFC would’ve closed its doors long ago.
Let’s look at the recent example of NXT standouts The Revival. The Revival are (arguably) one of the best tag teams that WWE currently has on the roster in terms of in-ring talent and heel promos. They are a natural foil to New Japan’s Young Bucks, and have an old-school approach to professional wrestling that appeals to the hardcore wrestling fanbase outside of the “WWE Universe.” On the last episode of Raw, The Revival were coming off of a big match the previous week against top tag-guys Dolph Ziggler and Drew McIntyre. Although they lost, it was a fantastic match on an otherwise forgettable night of Raw “action.” The week before that, they convincingly put down (as they should) tag-team comedy act The B-Team. You could say The Revival had momentum. When a competitor generates momentum, they are usually on a win streak. This has exceptions of course. As we know from combat sports, momentum doesn’t always have to be halted by a loss. Sometimes the best fights have the most narrow of victories and leave the crowd hungry for a rematch. Wins and losses can, in theory, both be productive, but there has to be a reason for the loss, a reason beyond “everyone eats a pin once in a while.” That’s not how sports work. We enjoy a fighter or athlete overcoming a temporary setback; we do not enjoy (nor even remember) athletes who lose half the time.
This brings me back to The Revival. Remember how they had momentum? Fast forward to this past week’s Raw. They face off against the B-Team once more. This is fine Monday night fare. The crowd likes chanting the B-Team’s theme song and they enjoy the comedy act for what it is. Admittedly, wrestling can be at its best when it’s interactive performance art. This is all fine. Fine, that is, until the B-Team beat The Revival clean in the middle of the ring. Read that again. A lower-card house-show tag-team comedy-act beat one of the most talented young tag teams on the roster. Clean. In the ring. No chicanery.
This is how you kill momentum.
It’s also the mirror effect of a big name veteran giving an up-and-coming young kid “the rub.” Let’s call it the smear. Now, in the storyline that you’ve created (WWE), The Revival — an otherwise credible threat in the tag-team division — can be beaten on any given week by your comedy act, and not just beaten either; they can be beaten cleanly. This, in effect, smears The Revival if you will. The audience may not keep track of their win/loss record (it’s terrible if you want to know) but they certainly log this in whatever recesses of their brain where they store wrestling power rankings as: “The Revival must suck. Otherwise, why would they lose to The B-Team?”
The truth is, The Revival shouldn’t lose to the B-Team, at least not without outside interference, chicanery, or some sort of malfeasance. To have them earn a credible win over a worthy opponent does nothing for the comedy act. However, It all but destroys your credible young tag team as a viable threat in the tag team division. You’ve taken a team that, although they lost to the top guys in the division, were a formidable opponent and credible threat, and effectively killed any sort of credibility with the audience. You’ve killed momentum. And as we see on a week to week basis, or especially leading up to pay-per-views, this momentum is hard to restart, especially for acts that have gotten the smear.
It could be said that “well, this ain’t real sports,” and I couldn’t agree more. But that’s why I find the inability to produce new, strong, exciting talent (with an incredibly deep roster, no less) all the more baffling. What the UFC is unable to do is produce coherent storylines because, well, reality just gets in the way. Fighters pop for PEDs, get arrested, miss weight, suffer injuries and other setbacks. WWE is in complete creative control in how they build their “fighters” and the stories that make them either compelling or boring in the ring. The rich resource of young talent on the WWE roster deserves better storytelling, and that storytelling can’t happen if everyone is as weak as everyone else. In real sports, hierarchies of talent emerge. In the WWE, they have yet to build a convincing hierarchy of champions, challengers, mid-card guys, house show performers, and jobbers. Instead, we have a roster that, outside of championship contention, is written (by the WWE no less!) as mediocre, but billed as championship caliber. Audiences aren’t stupid. Hell, they don’t even have to be “smart” to realize that what they’re feeling in response to 50/50 booking is a general apathy towards the majority of (what should be) a stacked roster. And so we continue to have the same headliners of yesteryear and the same three to four “top guys,” because no one on the roster below them can be taken seriously as a credible threat in contention for the title, or any title.
I would argue that wrestling fans are one of the most loyal — and sometimes self-loathing — fanbases out there. They will continue their Network subscriptions. They will continue to purchase merchandise. They will attend PPVs and live tapings and house shows. But perhaps they shouldn’t. They deserve a better product, a more coherent product, a product with continuity and suspense, a product that is as kind to its talent and fans as it is to its own profit.
