WWE has gone through many changes over the past few years. The company has made numerous mass cuts disguised as budget cuts and has continued transforming the once-thriving NXT brand. The end-goal is to bring up and develop homegrown talent. However, a former WWE Champion believes that talent development is one of the companies main issues.
During a recent interview with Wrestling with Freddie, a podcast from iHeart Media’s My Cultra Network, Chris Jericho discussed WWE’s struggle building new stars with Freddie Prinze Jr. The Demo God compared WWE’s struggles to AEW’s success.
“This is not a WWE bash. I worked there for almost 20 years and I loved working for WWE, but one thing they still have an issue with, and you can see it if you watch the show is building new stars. They really have a problem with that and I don’t know why. Once again, it doesn’t matter what they do. From day one in AEW, when we showed up on October 2nd, and even before that when we showed up for the first couple PPVs, we had no television deal. Then when we finally got one on TNT, it was an ad-revenue share. What that means for people that don’t know is you make the money based on the advertising. If you have 50 advertisers, you get a share. If you have one advertiser, you get a share. It was not a big monster deal, I realized early on kind of being the face of the company and the one guy the national audience knew besides Jim Ross, but the one guy that’s in the ring, and they knew Cody maybe but not really. Kenny and The Bucks were more independent or popular in other countries. I needed to make new stars as quickly as I could, Cody being one of them. Kenny Omega being another one.”
We will have to see if WWE’s new formula will work moving forward.
Below is the full episode of Wrestling With Freddie.
H/T WrestlingNews.co
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