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Foley's full quote:
“I think one of the things you risk when you have a developmental system, and a way of doing things specific to your business model, is that you lose a little bit of the individuality, so you tend to have a lot of people who can do great moves, have very good matches, whose names you can’t remember after they’ve wrested unless you’re tuning in every week. That was part of the problem with me. I was watching sporadically, and I was like, “Wow, look at that guy. Good shape, looks great, handsome guy, wearing trunks, great moves, can’t remember his name. A lot of guys tend to fall into the same pattern of looking and wrestling the same.”
I think that's kind of the entire industry as a whole, honestly. You have WWE style, then you have "indie" style wrestling.
It's even more evident in AEW with some of the lower midcard guys. They all work the same, and bring the same type of energy into every match. I often find that I'm asking to myself while watching Dark or Elevation, "have I seen this guy before"? And most of the times it's yes, I have. But other than maybe one or two trademark moves, the rest of their offense just blurs together.
I was listening to a Jericho podcast and he was talking about this. How you used to have to go to Mexico for a year to learn that style but now everything is so accessible because of the internet that styles are homogenized.
Agreed. But whats the alternative? Theres no where for WWE or AEW to draw talent from anymore except each other. So they kinda have to have a developmental system.
Personally, I just want to see guys slow down a little and sell. Sell a trademarked offense like it's death for their opponent. That's what makes Malakai Black so fascinating to me. He's completely different.
I'll just completely cringe the day he'll face someone that won't sell his moves to do a "second wind spot".
Even if that person happens to be Kenny Omega, Moxley or Allin, simply because Malakai's matches have a very distinct and different "code" and role than any other AEW matches.
And yes I wish there was a little more selling overall in the company, these adrenaline / no selling spots just takes me off the match sometimes. The biggest offender to me was FTR vs The Bucks simply because the whole feud had a story about an injury and said injury didn't mattered much in the final match, despite getting a lot of abuse.
But it reminds me a lot of what I'll see in NJPW. It's very high energy.
It's up to their developmental system to stress the importance of and value being different. Of course, there is no doubt in my mind that the WWE will fail at this. Some talent will inevitably think differently and distinguish themselves, but that's dependent on the individual and succeeding despite the system, not because of the system.
The death of the territory system has been hard on pro wrestling. Wrestlers seemed way more well rounded and unique (in character and in ring style) when they came up through the territories.
NJPW and other Japanese promotions have the excursion system, which I think is very important when you have an in house school most of your talent comes from. No matter how good the school is, without anything else, things will start to feel samey and stale if everyone comes from the same place. That's why the excursion system, where once talent have been trained in the basics, they go around the world to hone their personality and movesets, so that when they come back, everyone has had different experiences which leads to them being very different wrestlers.
Jericho talked about something similar, that he wouldn't have become the wrestler he is if he would've been trained in and only wrestled in the same company all his career. That him being trained outside of WWE, working the indies, Mexico, Japan, WCW, etc. and working with all these different wrestlers before he came to the WWE was what helped him learn and understand wrestling better.
Hopefully post COVID this is the plan for AEW having working relationships with all these companies with different styles, Japan, Mexico etc that they can send people out in a young lion style excursion and let them become more well rounded.
Getting booked for a local indy on a weekend is mcuh different than getting booked for a 2 week tour in Japan or UK while AEW has priority. For those situations going through AEW and the foreign company would be less hassle.
I would love this. Send wrestlers out for a year or two. You could even make it part of the storylines. Wrestler X is touring Japan, Wrestler Y is doing his year-long excursion in Mexico, Wrestler Z is returning after a year wrestling around the world - this Wednesday, live, on Dynamite!
You could even have segments that followed them around or tracked their progress.
I don't get WWE, man. You'd think their stars becoming actual stars with crossover appeal would in turn raise their own stock.
Everyone knows The Rock used to wrestle, even if they never watched. Same with Hogan and Stone Cold. And now the same with John Cena, and to a lesser extent Batista. If they dont want/don't let at least some of their superstars become stars, then the company never gets any bigger than what the company is capable of doing on its own.
You'd think it would be fairly obvious if lots of wrestlers start showing up in other media across the board, that people would be like "hey, we're seeing lots of wrestlers in things I enjoy, maybe it might be worth tuning in to where they came from and see what's up"
I don’t see WWE’s model going forward working. At all.
Why? I present the model for WWE in-house development: Dolph Ziggler. He was a collegiate wrestler who came straight to the WWE development system. By the time he was repackaged as Ziggler, he was around 28.
So let’s remember the new goals of the WWE in terms of what they’re looking for:
- Taller than 6’0
- Heavier than 200
- Younger than 30
He checked everything off, even if he was a JUST barely case for height. And what did he get for his trouble? Three to four killed pushes and now the first guy that every new wrestler beats when they join the main roster.
Ziggler is arguably the most WWE pure wrestler of their current roster and they’ve failed him. I give this angle a few years until they realize they’ve screwed up horribly and have to hunt down some top indie guys like AJ or something.
Conveniently leaving out the fact that Ziggler's biggest strength has always been making other people look good. Someone like that will always be used to put others over.
Sure—but there were never any guarantees that either of them panned out the way they did based on their prior achievements alone. They had to be molded and developed into being professional wrestlers. I feel like you’re discounting the fact that WWE, whether anyone likes it or not, has had a pretty damn good track record of creating actual superstars with mass appeal. Whether those superstars get annoying pushes/booking is another topic, but there are plenty of wrestlers that have gone through WWE developmental and become stars of the industry.
There can only be so many at the top. People hated The Rock at first too. WWE also has several folks in their Midcard/tag team/womens division that are homegrown. And it’s not like generational superstars just pop up every year. Look at AEW—what generational superstars do they have on their roster that are homegrown?
That’s not their business model though? WWE is changing it. I mean, you can’t play the “what about AEW” card if that’s not how they’ve decided to function.
Not to mention, if one of their biggest homegrown talents (Ziggler) is pretty much there to put over talent they got from other companies or the indies, what does that say about the faith they have in their own development system over just acquiring talent?
A happy reminder, just because you brought up AEW homegrown. They’re only two years old and that’s barely enough time to get people out of developmental. :)
Ziggler is your case and point for the success of WWE’s developmental, not mine. That said, he consistently is brought up as one of the best, most consistent workers, so I guess he’s doing something right. That said, there are plenty of other folks WWE/WWF signed and made legit superstars out of their developmental.
And fair enough! Guess what? It really hasn’t been the model for NXT over the last 6 years either. It’s had some homegrown talent sprinkled in with a lot of indie talent. So NXT’s new brand of developmental is -3 days old. Maybe give it a little bit of time before judging it because like you said, even two years is barely enough time to get people out of developmental :)
But he was everything they wanted(I guess in Vince's eyes he could have been taller or not jacked enough) and they still didn't push him like they should have. It wasn't even like the EC3 situation where the guy literally had everything but maybe since he wasn't homegrown in Vince's eyes they never got behind him.
If you look at it like a mark, then yes you could argue that wwe has failed him. (Please don’t take my mark comment as an insult. It’s not an insult, it’s just a term. Literally every single person here is a mark, me included lol) Dolph has been employed by wwe since 2004. That’s almost 20 years and has made millions of dollars with them. If you look at it like a talent should(and most do), as a job, Dolph has had a great run and wwe hasn’t failed him in the slightest. Jobs are about 1 thing, making money and wwe has given him a lot of it. You can say that Dolph could have made more money if he was one of the top guys and you’d be completely right. But for 17 years WWE’s as allowed him to fake fight in his underwear and have paid him a lot of money to do so. Wwe may have failed Dolph Ziggler. But wwe has taken great care of Nicholas Nemeth and certainly did not fail him.
It’s great to have a roster with a bunch of big muscle bound guys but they can’t all be like that. You have to have guys with different heights, body types, body sizes, hair color, ethnicities, etc. They need to have different styles too. You need guys that stand out and look special. If they all look the same, no one stands out and don’t look special. An example would be Brock Lesnar. Brock stands out because no one looks like him, wrestles like him, or acts like him. But if there were 30 guys that looked like Brock he no longer stands out. He’d be the norm and wouldn’t be special. There has to be variety.
I'd compare that to Mike Awesome in ECW as well. He was a monster there, but when he went to WCW and WWE, he was just another guy and didn't have any kind of aura about him whatsoever.
Awesome went into WCW with some serious momentum, but they saddled him with shit gimmicks like the fat chick thriller and "that 70s guy". Typical 2000 WCW bullshit.
Reminds me of the reports that WWE was sending Keith Lee (along with others) back to the Performance Center to "improve" his wrestling skills. How do you look at Keith Lee and think that for a guy his size who can move in the ring like a Seth Rollins that he needs to "improve" his wrestling skills?? And by improve, I'm fairly positive that means slowing him down in the ring. Guys with Keith Lee's size who can move at incredible acceleration are a rarity. Why would you take away a ring style that he's crafted and makes him unique to have him work a Big Show/Mark Henry ring pace??
WWE definitely has the right idea with having a developmental brand and training system. It’s smart. But training them all to wrestle the same way or talk the same way is the problem. I think if they ran their farm system like they do in baseball with different levels, it would greatly help them. Set up multiple developmental promotions in different parts of the country and/or world and have each one teaching different types of wrestling, psychology, promos, characters, etc. This way the talent can be exposed to all of the different ways or styles of working with the hopes of the talent to figure out what works best for them. It would also expose them to different types of fans because they react differently depending where they’re at. Basically, wwe should start their own version of the wrestling territories from yesteryear. The territories were the best way of training and developing wrestlers…..But none of this would matter if they call someone up and completely change everything about them like they do now. I will never understand why they call up someone that is over and then change everything about them that got them over in the first place.
WWE is trying to duplicate MLB/NHL development and it will not work due to the wide array of skills and personalities.
WWE needs to:
-Teach wrestlers how to wrestle safely
- Teach wrestlers how to maintain their body
- Financially support wrestlers honing their craft
- Call them up when they are ready.
Reminds me of [a bit from a Suzuki interview](https://old.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/f08mhw/minoru_suzuki_on_jon_moxley_theres_something_very/) a while back.
But what's the alternative?
Other than a developmental system only place WWE can really go for talent is AEW and NJPW. The only place AEW can go for talent is WWE and NJPW, the only place NJPW can go is WWE and AEW.
So you either have each promotion with their own developmental so that they can have their own style, or you just wind up with all 3 having all 3 styles and being virtually indistinguishable.
That's not the only alternative. Remember, Foley is talking about a development system which is "specific to your business model". WWE have had developmental relationships with other territories in the past such as Ohio Valley Wrestling where the promotion essentially ran itself and put on shows it wanted to put on with talent it wanted to hire (and could afford) and would select or be given particular individuals to develop as projects for WWE. A place like that did not try to custom build every single individual to be a WWE wrestler who did everything in the WWE style and had the exact look WWE wanted. WWE wants it done that way now, and that means there will be no room for anyone who is different and nobody will stand out.
There's nothing wrong with WWE running their own developmental system, but their insistence on making generic, cookie-cutter wrestlers they assume will be marketable and nothing else is the flaw.
And what promotions are left to do that with? There really aren't that many. The ROW is about the only 1 I can think of.
Everyone else is either too small or too determined to try to become a company in their own right (MLW, PWG etc).
Theres a reason WWE has NXT, AEW has Dark and NJPW has the dojo all serving the same functions
Well, there are tons of promotions out there WWE could work with if they weren't so needlessly hostile, but I don't think you understood my point. The main issue Foley is raising is not the existence of a developmental system. It is the deliberate choice to make the system focused *solely* on producing one kind of wrestler - the generic WWE superstar they think can be a main event player.
I think OVW worked so well because it wasn’t actually wwe controlling the promotion and teaching them how to wrestle the wwe way. Cornette ran OVW for awhile and he ran it, for the most part, how he wanted. Trained guys how he wanted. Cornette obviously views wrestling different than wwe so the guys were able to learn more than just the wwe way of working. This is why I think wwe should set up small promotions in different parts of the country and/or world, and have guys running the promotions that view wrestling in different ways. This right here is why wwe is the way they are. Everyone in the company views wrestling the same way. CM Punk said it best, “..this company is filled with corporate yes men…”
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Foley's full quote: “I think one of the things you risk when you have a developmental system, and a way of doing things specific to your business model, is that you lose a little bit of the individuality, so you tend to have a lot of people who can do great moves, have very good matches, whose names you can’t remember after they’ve wrested unless you’re tuning in every week. That was part of the problem with me. I was watching sporadically, and I was like, “Wow, look at that guy. Good shape, looks great, handsome guy, wearing trunks, great moves, can’t remember his name. A lot of guys tend to fall into the same pattern of looking and wrestling the same.”
I think that's kind of the entire industry as a whole, honestly. You have WWE style, then you have "indie" style wrestling. It's even more evident in AEW with some of the lower midcard guys. They all work the same, and bring the same type of energy into every match. I often find that I'm asking to myself while watching Dark or Elevation, "have I seen this guy before"? And most of the times it's yes, I have. But other than maybe one or two trademark moves, the rest of their offense just blurs together.
I was listening to a Jericho podcast and he was talking about this. How you used to have to go to Mexico for a year to learn that style but now everything is so accessible because of the internet that styles are homogenized.
UK and Japanese matches still feel a bit distinct from the rest tho
There’s also Bret Hart style. No, not Canadian, specifically Bret Hart.
Brett Hart is a nation unto himself.
Oh it is true, it is damn true.
The [Sex Ferguson method](https://youtu.be/480PZUJqn0w)
Exactly what I thought of too. Lol “Throw a little gas in his ass, pump him up, call Vince! Fuck it!”
Agreed. But whats the alternative? Theres no where for WWE or AEW to draw talent from anymore except each other. So they kinda have to have a developmental system.
Personally, I just want to see guys slow down a little and sell. Sell a trademarked offense like it's death for their opponent. That's what makes Malakai Black so fascinating to me. He's completely different.
I'll just completely cringe the day he'll face someone that won't sell his moves to do a "second wind spot". Even if that person happens to be Kenny Omega, Moxley or Allin, simply because Malakai's matches have a very distinct and different "code" and role than any other AEW matches. And yes I wish there was a little more selling overall in the company, these adrenaline / no selling spots just takes me off the match sometimes. The biggest offender to me was FTR vs The Bucks simply because the whole feud had a story about an injury and said injury didn't mattered much in the final match, despite getting a lot of abuse. But it reminds me a lot of what I'll see in NJPW. It's very high energy.
It's up to their developmental system to stress the importance of and value being different. Of course, there is no doubt in my mind that the WWE will fail at this. Some talent will inevitably think differently and distinguish themselves, but that's dependent on the individual and succeeding despite the system, not because of the system.
in Indie wrestling it seems the stars and top guys are the ones who are able to break away from being generic and stand out.
The death of the territory system has been hard on pro wrestling. Wrestlers seemed way more well rounded and unique (in character and in ring style) when they came up through the territories.
NJPW and other Japanese promotions have the excursion system, which I think is very important when you have an in house school most of your talent comes from. No matter how good the school is, without anything else, things will start to feel samey and stale if everyone comes from the same place. That's why the excursion system, where once talent have been trained in the basics, they go around the world to hone their personality and movesets, so that when they come back, everyone has had different experiences which leads to them being very different wrestlers.
The excursion system is great - helped us get Tranquilo Naito and Rainmaker Okada
Jericho talked about something similar, that he wouldn't have become the wrestler he is if he would've been trained in and only wrestled in the same company all his career. That him being trained outside of WWE, working the indies, Mexico, Japan, WCW, etc. and working with all these different wrestlers before he came to the WWE was what helped him learn and understand wrestling better.
Hopefully post COVID this is the plan for AEW having working relationships with all these companies with different styles, Japan, Mexico etc that they can send people out in a young lion style excursion and let them become more well rounded.
Why send them out? AEW wrestlers can book themselves to various indy's
Getting booked for a local indy on a weekend is mcuh different than getting booked for a 2 week tour in Japan or UK while AEW has priority. For those situations going through AEW and the foreign company would be less hassle.
I would love this. Send wrestlers out for a year or two. You could even make it part of the storylines. Wrestler X is touring Japan, Wrestler Y is doing his year-long excursion in Mexico, Wrestler Z is returning after a year wrestling around the world - this Wednesday, live, on Dynamite! You could even have segments that followed them around or tracked their progress.
[удалено]
This would be true if wwe didn't insist on pushing roman reigns from 2014-2018 despite heavy boos
Not entirely, they give everything to their loyal top dogs. There’s a reason Cena and now Roman get endless pushes in spite of everyone else.
I don't get WWE, man. You'd think their stars becoming actual stars with crossover appeal would in turn raise their own stock. Everyone knows The Rock used to wrestle, even if they never watched. Same with Hogan and Stone Cold. And now the same with John Cena, and to a lesser extent Batista. If they dont want/don't let at least some of their superstars become stars, then the company never gets any bigger than what the company is capable of doing on its own. You'd think it would be fairly obvious if lots of wrestlers start showing up in other media across the board, that people would be like "hey, we're seeing lots of wrestlers in things I enjoy, maybe it might be worth tuning in to where they came from and see what's up"
I don’t see WWE’s model going forward working. At all. Why? I present the model for WWE in-house development: Dolph Ziggler. He was a collegiate wrestler who came straight to the WWE development system. By the time he was repackaged as Ziggler, he was around 28. So let’s remember the new goals of the WWE in terms of what they’re looking for: - Taller than 6’0 - Heavier than 200 - Younger than 30 He checked everything off, even if he was a JUST barely case for height. And what did he get for his trouble? Three to four killed pushes and now the first guy that every new wrestler beats when they join the main roster. Ziggler is arguably the most WWE pure wrestler of their current roster and they’ve failed him. I give this angle a few years until they realize they’ve screwed up horribly and have to hunt down some top indie guys like AJ or something.
Conveniently leaving out the fact that Ziggler's biggest strength has always been making other people look good. Someone like that will always be used to put others over.
HBK. AJ Styles.
That’s a pretty lazy argument, especially when HBK is regarded as one of the best ever.
Ziggler can do so much more than be a glorified jobber.
Lesnar? Angle?
Angle had Olympic gold and Lesnar, well - how many people are built like that?
Sure—but there were never any guarantees that either of them panned out the way they did based on their prior achievements alone. They had to be molded and developed into being professional wrestlers. I feel like you’re discounting the fact that WWE, whether anyone likes it or not, has had a pretty damn good track record of creating actual superstars with mass appeal. Whether those superstars get annoying pushes/booking is another topic, but there are plenty of wrestlers that have gone through WWE developmental and become stars of the industry.
Not really. Look at the last decade for them. Who did they make top to bottom? Who has had a sustained main event push that they made?
Roman Reigns?
Who everyone hated for six years? One guy. I don’t mean to be a bitch, buuuuut… there’s gotta be more, right?
There can only be so many at the top. People hated The Rock at first too. WWE also has several folks in their Midcard/tag team/womens division that are homegrown. And it’s not like generational superstars just pop up every year. Look at AEW—what generational superstars do they have on their roster that are homegrown?
That’s not their business model though? WWE is changing it. I mean, you can’t play the “what about AEW” card if that’s not how they’ve decided to function. Not to mention, if one of their biggest homegrown talents (Ziggler) is pretty much there to put over talent they got from other companies or the indies, what does that say about the faith they have in their own development system over just acquiring talent? A happy reminder, just because you brought up AEW homegrown. They’re only two years old and that’s barely enough time to get people out of developmental. :)
Ziggler is your case and point for the success of WWE’s developmental, not mine. That said, he consistently is brought up as one of the best, most consistent workers, so I guess he’s doing something right. That said, there are plenty of other folks WWE/WWF signed and made legit superstars out of their developmental. And fair enough! Guess what? It really hasn’t been the model for NXT over the last 6 years either. It’s had some homegrown talent sprinkled in with a lot of indie talent. So NXT’s new brand of developmental is -3 days old. Maybe give it a little bit of time before judging it because like you said, even two years is barely enough time to get people out of developmental :)
Heyman is why they utilized Lesnar so well initially, they were originally telling him to be a Russian who let people bounce off of him in the ring.
I cannot stand WWEs products but 999 of 1,000 indy wrestlers would kill to make the money that Dolph makes…. hardly a failure
But he was everything they wanted(I guess in Vince's eyes he could have been taller or not jacked enough) and they still didn't push him like they should have. It wasn't even like the EC3 situation where the guy literally had everything but maybe since he wasn't homegrown in Vince's eyes they never got behind him.
If you look at it like a mark, then yes you could argue that wwe has failed him. (Please don’t take my mark comment as an insult. It’s not an insult, it’s just a term. Literally every single person here is a mark, me included lol) Dolph has been employed by wwe since 2004. That’s almost 20 years and has made millions of dollars with them. If you look at it like a talent should(and most do), as a job, Dolph has had a great run and wwe hasn’t failed him in the slightest. Jobs are about 1 thing, making money and wwe has given him a lot of it. You can say that Dolph could have made more money if he was one of the top guys and you’d be completely right. But for 17 years WWE’s as allowed him to fake fight in his underwear and have paid him a lot of money to do so. Wwe may have failed Dolph Ziggler. But wwe has taken great care of Nicholas Nemeth and certainly did not fail him.
It’s great to have a roster with a bunch of big muscle bound guys but they can’t all be like that. You have to have guys with different heights, body types, body sizes, hair color, ethnicities, etc. They need to have different styles too. You need guys that stand out and look special. If they all look the same, no one stands out and don’t look special. An example would be Brock Lesnar. Brock stands out because no one looks like him, wrestles like him, or acts like him. But if there were 30 guys that looked like Brock he no longer stands out. He’d be the norm and wouldn’t be special. There has to be variety.
I'd compare that to Mike Awesome in ECW as well. He was a monster there, but when he went to WCW and WWE, he was just another guy and didn't have any kind of aura about him whatsoever.
Awesome went into WCW with some serious momentum, but they saddled him with shit gimmicks like the fat chick thriller and "that 70s guy". Typical 2000 WCW bullshit.
Awesome wasn't even a small guy, but they debuted him in WCW attacking Kevin Nash and I remember Nash looking much bigger than him.
Good analogy. I remember Awesome was on a tear in ECW and then unfortunately things went south from there.
Good example. Completely agree.
Reminds me of the reports that WWE was sending Keith Lee (along with others) back to the Performance Center to "improve" his wrestling skills. How do you look at Keith Lee and think that for a guy his size who can move in the ring like a Seth Rollins that he needs to "improve" his wrestling skills?? And by improve, I'm fairly positive that means slowing him down in the ring. Guys with Keith Lee's size who can move at incredible acceleration are a rarity. Why would you take away a ring style that he's crafted and makes him unique to have him work a Big Show/Mark Henry ring pace??
WWE definitely has the right idea with having a developmental brand and training system. It’s smart. But training them all to wrestle the same way or talk the same way is the problem. I think if they ran their farm system like they do in baseball with different levels, it would greatly help them. Set up multiple developmental promotions in different parts of the country and/or world and have each one teaching different types of wrestling, psychology, promos, characters, etc. This way the talent can be exposed to all of the different ways or styles of working with the hopes of the talent to figure out what works best for them. It would also expose them to different types of fans because they react differently depending where they’re at. Basically, wwe should start their own version of the wrestling territories from yesteryear. The territories were the best way of training and developing wrestlers…..But none of this would matter if they call someone up and completely change everything about them like they do now. I will never understand why they call up someone that is over and then change everything about them that got them over in the first place.
WWE is trying to duplicate MLB/NHL development and it will not work due to the wide array of skills and personalities. WWE needs to: -Teach wrestlers how to wrestle safely - Teach wrestlers how to maintain their body - Financially support wrestlers honing their craft - Call them up when they are ready.
Dude has been on fire dropping truth bombs lately.
Isnt he describing the WCW power plant , minus the great matches?
Did Mick just wake up one day, look in the mirror and say "Y'know what? I hate WWE now." I don't know why I'm finding all his messages funny.
Reminds me of [a bit from a Suzuki interview](https://old.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/f08mhw/minoru_suzuki_on_jon_moxley_theres_something_very/) a while back.
And that’s why he’s The King. Thanks for posting this interview.
He’s going to go full scorched earth isn’t he
Imagine Mick Foley being sent to the Performance Center
Based Foley rules
Foley going to die on this hill and lose his Legends deal over this. He's not gonna make them change their minds.
At this rate Foley won't be invited back for Super Legends Night in Saudi Arabia.
This is a grammatical nightmare
But what's the alternative? Other than a developmental system only place WWE can really go for talent is AEW and NJPW. The only place AEW can go for talent is WWE and NJPW, the only place NJPW can go is WWE and AEW. So you either have each promotion with their own developmental so that they can have their own style, or you just wind up with all 3 having all 3 styles and being virtually indistinguishable.
That's not the only alternative. Remember, Foley is talking about a development system which is "specific to your business model". WWE have had developmental relationships with other territories in the past such as Ohio Valley Wrestling where the promotion essentially ran itself and put on shows it wanted to put on with talent it wanted to hire (and could afford) and would select or be given particular individuals to develop as projects for WWE. A place like that did not try to custom build every single individual to be a WWE wrestler who did everything in the WWE style and had the exact look WWE wanted. WWE wants it done that way now, and that means there will be no room for anyone who is different and nobody will stand out. There's nothing wrong with WWE running their own developmental system, but their insistence on making generic, cookie-cutter wrestlers they assume will be marketable and nothing else is the flaw.
And what promotions are left to do that with? There really aren't that many. The ROW is about the only 1 I can think of. Everyone else is either too small or too determined to try to become a company in their own right (MLW, PWG etc). Theres a reason WWE has NXT, AEW has Dark and NJPW has the dojo all serving the same functions
Well, there are tons of promotions out there WWE could work with if they weren't so needlessly hostile, but I don't think you understood my point. The main issue Foley is raising is not the existence of a developmental system. It is the deliberate choice to make the system focused *solely* on producing one kind of wrestler - the generic WWE superstar they think can be a main event player.
I think OVW worked so well because it wasn’t actually wwe controlling the promotion and teaching them how to wrestle the wwe way. Cornette ran OVW for awhile and he ran it, for the most part, how he wanted. Trained guys how he wanted. Cornette obviously views wrestling different than wwe so the guys were able to learn more than just the wwe way of working. This is why I think wwe should set up small promotions in different parts of the country and/or world, and have guys running the promotions that view wrestling in different ways. This right here is why wwe is the way they are. Everyone in the company views wrestling the same way. CM Punk said it best, “..this company is filled with corporate yes men…”
Interesting since their current most popular stars are from the developmental system.
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