My thoughts on AEW hiring talent from WWE

AEW has already put Jungle Boy, Sammy, and Darby on the map within their first few years. that's more stars than wcw made themselves in their span. so the comparisons are confusing if not borderline obtuse.

just like WCW and TNA before them...they need the right guys at the right time from the other company.

But like TNA/WCW they need to grow their homegrown guys which they are at least doing that right.

I also agree the roster is too bloated rn. They have like over 100 ppl. WWE has 100 ppl also. But its spread across three different brands Raw/SmackDown/NXT.
Hell SmackDown only has 30 wrestlers

It’s not like AEW is signing talent to gigantic deals to keep them away from other territories and then cut those talent for budget cuts.

This is such a silly argument though because WWF was composed of mostly NWA and AWA talent in the early 90s. They had alot of WCW talent in the late 90s.

The talent is the talent guys. Was there anybody on the market BETTER than Ambrose, or Black, or Bryan? You cant pass them up just because they were on wwe programming. Just like WCW misused Nash and Taker and Austin in the early 90s, all those guys became major stars in WWF. Should they not have signed them??

The talent they're signing was being used incorrectly. If somebody gets rid of a perfectly good drill because they cant iron their clothes with it, that doesnt mean a carpenter shouldn't take it off their hands and make use of it correctly.

If the Bucs release Tom Brady. Should another team not pick him up because he was on an NFL team already? Its silly. The landscape only has so many guys.

As long as more than one person watches wrestling, this debate will never end 😉

The weird thing about it is people say it like oh, Aleister Black is a WWE guy because he wrestled for them. He also wrestled on the indies before WWE, does that make him a CZW guy? The man, Tommy End is a wrestler, he's a brand of his own that is looking for a team to apply his craft. He's not a WWE guy, hes a free agent. He worked for WWE and now he works for AEW, thats what I don't understand, like should he quit wrestling because he was well liked and good at what he did in WWE but they mismanaged him? Being obviously talented is a reason AEW SHOULDN'T sign him?

The best analogy I can give is sports. Dan Marino NEVER won a single Super Bowl, had the Dolphins released him, should nobody pick him up because he's a Dolphin? He was obviously skilled, and more skilled than the guy most winning teams had at QB. Sometimes its the team your on, not the player. I don't understand the logic at all in the "they pick up all WWE guys". #1, WWE was the company with the deepest pockets for a LONG time, so ALL the top talent in the world was picked up by them because they could pay them better than anybody else...otherwise, Taz would have stayed in ECW & CM Punk would still be an ROH guy so on and so on. WWE has all the best talent on the field. Now we have 2 companies that have deep pockets, so naturally that top talent is gonna be split up a bit more than it has lately, but this is really no different than what WCW/WWF/ECW were doing in the 90's/2000's.

Steve Austin was successful in WCW. WWF picked him up and actually presented him WORSE than he was in WCW when he first came in. Hulk Hogan was already a star being Hulk Hogan in the AWA. I guess its ok for WWE to take top talent from around the world and showcase them on their programming, just not AEW.

Exactly. And my point is, when you’re a company like WWE, for the longest time they were pooling the best talent in the market behind their doors. It’s not so much that these are WWE guys, they are the best talent on the market and WWE has the deepest pockets to acquire them all. So naturally, whoever they let go of is going to be head and shoulders better than anybody else that’s left over from another promotion.

You can count WWE’s home grown talent in the 80’s and 90’s on 1 hand. Hogan was an AWA guy. Bret Hart was a Calgary Stampede guy. Stone Cold was a WCW guy. The Road Warriors were NWA guys. Flair was an NWA/ WCW guy. Randy Savage was from Memphis Wrestling, on and on and on. A lot of these guys were already making money before Vince bought the act for his programming.

It’s an uninformed perspective and it stems from 2 places. 1st is TNA, whenever they would bring in an older, released WWE wrestler and basically put them on TV as that same WWE character, it was perceived that they were picking up the scraps. Anybody WWE releases, TNA scoops up.

And the 2nd place is WCW. This narrative has been on so many DVD’s that people have been trained to think it’s a negative when it’s in fact the very same thing Vince McMahon did to all the territories in the 80’s. Bischoff went and signed a bunch of Vinces talent, yes, but most of it was still extremely valuable talent that he PULLED away from WWF. They phrase it on the DVD’s like he was just signing anybody because they had money, you know, the same thing Vince did in the 80’s where he’d buy top talent from the territories, put them in a dumb gimmick like Saba Simba, and make it so they could never go back to the territory and draw money again. WCW was pulling away WWFs top guys like Nash, Hall, Kid, Hogan, Savage, Piper…these were still VERY valuable names. I’d count the Steiners, Flair & Luger but by this own logic, they were already WCW guys.

But both of these instances have been drilled into wrestling fans minds to be negatives. Like it’s frowned upon to sign the best talent out there, just like WWE did and does. Is Nakamura a New Japan guy? Is AJ a TNA guy? Is Daniel Bryan an ROH guy? If WWE didn’t cherry pick the best talent from around the world already, they wouldn’t all be under the same umbrella. None of these guys are “WWE guys”, they’ve just all been pulled from their natural habitats and placed in the WWE zoo.

Which will be hilarious, because for the entirety of their time in WWE they were seen as the ultimate outsiders and picked up major supporting due to that.

I'd make a pretty strong argument that Turner wasn't either.  I think he sort of gets lost in the shuffle because he faded out of the public eye after the AOL/Time Warner merger.  But he was an exceptionally sharp business man who had a real eye for evergreen content, be it Turner Classic Movies, the Braves, or WCW.  The guy really pioneered the many of the media strategies that we see today from 

I'd argue that Turner was ahead of his time by a couple of decades.  If you look at the mid/late 90's, WCW in any given week was generating a ton of content.  You had Nitro and later Thunder, but there was also Pro, Saturday Night, Worldwide, Main Event, Prime, and Power Hour.  You're looking at something like 8-10 hours of content each week, all on stations that WCW owned and reaped the ad revenue from.  Plus Clash of the Champions specials, that tended to draw strong ratings and were very similar to the "special show" model NXT and AEW are using today. 

It was also the perfect filler - content could be repackaged easily for "best of" shows, or if a Braves game ran long and the timeslot was pre-empted, you didn't have a show complaining about missing their slot.  Much like Sinclair with ROH, it was still a lot cheaper to own and operate a wrestling company than to pay for 8-10 hours of syndicated programs each week.

There are obviously plenty of stories of mismanagement, being too generous with contracts, etc.  But I put that on Bischoff and the middle management, not Turner.  WCW was just a part of a massive tv empire at that time.  But again...even if you had Barry Darsow or the Armstrongs under contract to six figure deals and they only wrestled on B programs, they were known names who would hold enough viewers to sell advertisers.  I think Turner looked at wrestling salaries through the lens of sports contracts, which Meltzer has argued for decades.  If Hulk Hogan was making as much money as Fred McGriff, one was the top draw in his field and made millions in merch while the other was probably a top 10-15 player at his position.  

Obviously the train eventually jumped the tracks.  But it isn't as bad as people make it out to be in retrospect.  Even the annual losses are inflated due to corporate bean counting.  I think Bischoff mentioned that they had to "rent" the Turner Sports production trucks in order to prop up the profits for that department.  And even if WCW shows produced X to produce, if X is cheaper than X+1 that they would have paid for syndicated content, it's still a win for the company as a whole.

Had WCW somehow survived, they'd have a tape library and property that would be incredibly valuable today.  There were absolutely huge missteps in booking, talent development, and overall bureaucratic incompetence at middle management.  But Turner's overall media strategy was consistently ahead of the curve and set the foundation for a lot of the media consolidation we see today.  Unfortunately the mergers meant he pretty much got wiped off the map.