Last week, WWE signed a new television deal with Fox for SmackDown Live rights. The deal is reportedly in excess of $1 billion, the sort of deal which makes the floating $25 million over the nice, round, fat billion number sound like a rounding error instead of an obscene amount of money.
There are all sorts of facts about the deal which should make us perk up and pay attention. The sheer size of the deal, for one, which seems odd because, despite catering to the cliched “coveted demographic” of young adult men, WWE’s advertising dollars tend to skew less luxury and more working class due to the stigma around pro wrestling. Which is absolutely fine, but it makes the scale of the deal a little out of step with that fact.
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SmackDown is moving to Friday nights, a traditional network television death slot since time immemorial. Which, again, makes the scale of the deal seem strange. $1 billion for a show being shunted to Friday nights has all the earmarks of a bubble, a marker of just how unmoored money has become from anything real, and how damn much of it media conglomerates have hoarded. SmackDown on Friday nights isn’t worth a billion dollars. It won’t even be on Friday nights a year after it moves.
We barely notice when a company moves past too big to fail into so big it could buy the entire industry it works in with change to spare. Distressingly, it’s not even clear whether most of us even care anymore. Our shows are glitzy and our Amazon deliveries get to our houses on time. Besides, it was just a couple of weeks ago that All In sold out, proving the indies are more than fine. Who cares about this alarmism?
Quietly, over the weekend, Japanese women’s wrestling superstar Io Shirai signed on with WWE, presumably to do a stint in NXT before moving up to the main roster. This is based on a longstanding interest; Shirai was nearly signed last year before WWE balked due to medical issues. Odds are that Shirai was going to hit WWE eventually, no matter what.
It’s the last bit in the linked article from Dave Meltzer, though, which is cause for concern. Other wrestlers from Stardom have been contacted by WWE, in what reads like an impending talent raid. Stardom isn’t big enough to thrive in such a situation.
Besides Shirai and Toni Storm, who also signed a U.K. contract with WWE, the company has made offers to other Stardom wrestlers and with the Mae Young Classic this summer, the Stardom Five-Star tournament has lost several wrestlers who were originally to be part of it.
WWE is aiming to show U.K. promotions PROGRESS and ICW on the WWE Network, a shot across the bow of British pro wrestling’s independence. They’ve long snatched up indie talent from all over the world, but it’s accelerated over the past few years and seems to be picking up even more pace. And all the while WWE keeps getting bigger and bigger.
This isn’t about whether there will be an indie scene or if your local VFW hall promotion is going to be around. It’s about what those things look like and how much trust you have for WWE. When Shirai signs on to WWE, it means a draw from a smaller, more intimate promotion is gone. That means less money to work with for that promotion and its wrestlers. More are tempted to leave, and that eventually leaves the pro wrestling landscape a little smaller.
Shirai will get more money, which is good. She still won’t have health care benefits, because that’s not how WWE operates. The road hours will be hell, because WWE never stops touring, something I’m not sure fans or wrestlers alike fully reckon with when it comes to consequences. She also won’t have the degree of creative freedom that she does in Stardom, at least once she gets up to the main roster.
That last bit may be the important bit for WWE. Vince McMahon and his family have a vision of pro wrestling. It’s one which is sanitized and corporate, but also lashed to the turbulent whims of one of modern American history’s great weirdos. For whatever godawful reason, via logic only the mega-rich are able to parse, that vision demands to be imposed on all of pro wrestling.
This is orthogonal to whether WWE’s style is enjoyable or not. I happen to enjoy it, at least for the pay-per-views, which are and have been pretty excellent. It’s about whether this vibrant business can remain as colorful and variable as its been since the indies pulled themselves to the position of relative prominence they have now.
WWE isn’t going to just call it a day now that the McMahons have their billion-dollar TV deals (Raw stands to get a similar figure when its rights go up for bid). Corporations don’t just stop. They squeeze workers. They impose a sameness over whatever landscape they’re able to. They rewrite the rules so that they can get more. They creep and crawl until there’s nothing left but them. That’s how this works.
It’s impossible to say the exact ways things break down. For now, it’s a theoretical future sketched in broad terms: WWE will snatch up more indie workers, smaller promotions will struggle, promotions funneled to WWE Network will feel pressure to conform to WWE standards. How those things play out in the specific, the who goes where before they’re fired for what, are left to morbid imagination, but it’s an imagination informed by what we’ve seen before in the NFL, Amazon, Apple, and a hundred others who took all they could reach.
