Bryan Danielson addresses WWE’s decision to produce counter-programming against AEW
During an interview with The Kairouz Bros, Bryan Danielson addressed WWE’s decision to produce counter-programming against AEW…
“I’m just curious of like what the people who are making these decisions, what they’re thinking, right? In the sense of like, ‘oh, okay, this AEW thing, it’s a real dangerous to our billion-dollar business.’ That can’t be it.
Because the one thing that I think is that AEW existing and being this challenger brand, and being as successful as we’ve been, has changed the landscape for wrestling—for the wrestlers themselves. So it’s like, wrestlers are being paid more now than ever, right? From a sports rights perspective, for example, most major sports in the United States—the players get anywhere between 40 to 50% of the revenue. And WWE was paying their wrestlers nowhere close to that. And now, keep in mind, they’re still not paying anywhere close to that. But they do have to pay more, because if they don’t, the talent’s going to leave and go to AEW. AEW does pay that 40 to 50% of their revenue to their wrestlers, despite making much less money. I mean, we still—our TV rights deal was incredible, but we’re still the challenger brand catching up on however many years WWE’s had.
It’s interesting, because we’re not at the point of being a threat. It’s just a weird… This is one of the things that people who really crave power and a lot of money play these weird games that I don’t understand. It’s like, ‘okay, we’re going to run all the competitors that might be competitive with us out of this business.’ Why? It’s good for the wrestlers. It’s good for the wrestlers both in AEW and in WWE. It’s been good for them. If AEW wouldn’t have started, would Cody Rhodes be where he is right now? No. They have a mega star because AEW exists, right? Would CM Punk ever have come back? Probably not.
And so it’s like, there are all those things. So I would be really interested—and I’m not saying this in the sense of like, oh, those evil people—because when you think of corporations, they are not people, right? In the United States corporations have been determined legally as people. They have the same rights as people, and it’s just like—wait, what? They’re not people. So these corporations make these decisions. But the people in WWE, like a lot of the people I know, are great people, right? And so I’d be interested to know, okay, what’s the decision-making process in this? Why? But, you know, it’s not my monkey, it’s not my circus, whatever the line is for that, you know what I mean? And so sometimes I just think about it, and I’m like, ‘oh.’ And then I think a little bit too much about it, and I’m like, ‘oh.’ Not my monkeys, not my circus.”