The Post’s Joseph Staszewski brings you around the world of professional wrestling in his weekly column, the Post Match Angle.
Three straight weekends of wrestling pay-per-views have me thinking and doing a deep dive into the best way to approach putting together a card.
Is there a pay-per-view sweet spot and are there risks to not hitting it?
WWE and AEW take different approaches to their biggest shows that seem to fit the number they produce and how they are distributed.
WWE will do 12 this year and they are part of a Peacock subscription for $7.99 per month or $80 for the year, so you aren’t asking fans to go into their wallets for each show. AEW will do nine and cost the viewer $49.99 apiece. So wanting to pack shows to add value makes sense.
AEW has put on 49 matches on the main cards of their first five PPVs this year — which usually run around four hours at an average of 9.8 matches per show.
WWE on the other hand has done 50 matches over nine shows, 5.5 per night as non-WrestlerMania and SummerSlam cards have been limited to five matches apiece and three hours.
TNA’s pay-per-view main cards this year have consisted of 7-9 matches over three hours by comparison.
WWE and AEW have both put on a somewhat similar percentage of multi-person matches with 33 (67 percent) for Tony Khan’s company and 30 (60 percent) for Triple H and Co. — the WWE number includes the six regularly scheduled Royal Rumbles, Elimination Chambers and Money in the Bank matches.
But after a deeper dive, WWE’s format has led to some curious trends.
The men’s tag team championships have been defended just once in a traditional match on its premium live events — at the Royal Rumble — and twice overall. Four of the five two-on-two matches in general on PLEs have included the Judgment Day or the Bloodline in some form, not including the six‐man tag at Money in the Bank and the mixed tag match at Bash In Berlin. The women’s tag team championships have appeared five times on PLEs, three in traditional tag matches and all but one involving Bianca Belair and Jade Cargill.
Cody Rhodes, Randy Orton and Damian Priest have appeared in seven PLE matches each this year, excluding the Royal Rumble. Drew McIntyre and Kevin Owens have been in six and Logan Paul and Gunther five apiece. Only Belair has been in five matches on the women’s side.
It shows you better be in a top-five story across two shows to get on PLEs.
More concerning is in WWE’s past five PLEs, 21 of the 27 matches (77 percent) have been singles clashes.
Running five matches has allowed WWE to keep its second-tier shows more digestible at three hours — outside of Royal Rumble, WrestleMania, SummerSlam— and WWE has often put one of the championships not on the line in the main event of SmackDown the day before or the Raw following the show to bolster its TV shows.
But the format leaves very little chance for your secondary stories and tag teams to make a PLE when you have six singles championships to regularly get on shows. It’s possible, as old WWE “In Your House” shows used to feature six to seven matches in two hours.
It’s a quality over quantity approach, giving wrestlers time to properly tell stories that has mostly worked and has been praised by Sami Zayn and The Miz in interviews, with Zayn telling Fightful he still has “mixed feelings” about there being fewer overall opportunities
But how sustainable is it with so few talents regularly making the cut?
Even so, WWE’s long entrances, ads and video packages can eat up plenty of time in the three-hour format and some matches run too long; a nearly 35-minute main event between Randy Orton and Gunther at Bash in Berlin could have been 25 minutes.
On the flip side, AEW usually gets its big stars on PPVs and gives fans tags, trios and battle royals, but could probably hold a trios match or one of its secondary titles for Dynamite or Collision if need be to tighten things up. There can be a little bit of audience fatigue going into the final three matches, especially if you have watched the hour-long preshow.
So where is there a sweet spot?
I’d say seven to eight matches at three and half hours — maybe with one to two matches in the final half hour of a pre-show. Allowing 25 minutes for each match — entrances, video packages and wrestling — it leaves you 35 minutes for your ads before cutting some matches to maybe 10-12 minutes to save more time.
It should give promotions enough time to get their major stories and more on shows without burning out an audience or leaving them wanting more.
NXT No Mercy showed how well the TNA partnership is working for WWE’s developmental brand. It felt like the two most emotional matches on the card featured TNA talent.
One was Zachary Wentz defeating Wes Lee with help from Trey Miguel taking the chair away from Lee. The Rascalz storyline continues to add layers and hopefully includes Lee going to challenge Wentz for his X Division championship at the next big TNA show.
Secondly, no one seemed to get a bigger crowd reaction and support than TNA star Joe Hendry. The main event showed that the WWE audience, at least the more hardcore NXT fans, certainly follow products outside of the company.
While Hendry appears to be finally done at NXT as his loss cleared the way for Trick Williams and Ethan Page to renew their story, he certainly left an impression and helped raise his stock.
Whatever Jon Moxley is up to, it could be the thing AEW is missing — that big story that carries everything else for a single show or across their programs.
Moxley, the king of chaos, returned with new music, a new edge and a new partner in Marina Shafir, who loves violence as much as he does. He seemed to put the status quo in AEW on notice.
He told Tony Schiavone this isn’t your company anymore and it immediately sparked rampant speculation that this was AEW’s way of bringing Shane McMahon in. This certainly feels like a big enough setup to be, but I need to see a little more before I will say it needs to be McMahon or fans will be disappointed.
It could just be a new faction for Moxley that maybe adds his good friend Sami Callihan or Bobby Lashley— who has an MMA background — to present a level of danger and violence the new Elite and even the Blackpool Combat Club never could.
So far, AEW hasn’t done anything to make Ricochet feel like a big deal or any different than what we saw in WWE. Hopefully, Wednesday was the start of an angle with Will Ospreay that sees them team up first and then Ricochet beating him for the International championship.
MJF felt a little too much like “Hangman” Adam Page — who is obsessed with Swerve Strickland — telling Ospreay he was going to be lurking whenever he tries to win the world championship.
Felt Donovan Dijak had something in his final NXT persona — ’90s movie villain vibes — and he can really go in the ring. Feel optimistic about what we will see from him after his debut at MLW’s Summer of the Beasts given how the company tells stories and its gritter presentation.
Absolute props to Carmelo Hayes and Andrade for four sensational matches so far — now even at 2-2 after the former’s win Friday. The potentially deciding fifth match needs to be hyped up for a SmackDown main event or go best of seven to get to Bad Blood in October.
How conflicted Tiffany Stratton is to use the Money in the Bank contract on Nia Jax’s WWE Women’s World championship has become a refreshing twist on the briefcase.
Chase U continues to be the biggest roller-coaster ride in NXT with the highs, especially championship wins, seeming to last a lot shorter than the lows, with Ridge Holland turning heel and not out to destroy the school less than a month after winning the tag belts with Andre Chase. How many times can NXT go to that well?
The best thing Joe Tessitore did in his debut on Raw was give off the feeling he’s been there for weeks. He came off as knowledgeable about the product and gave the show a smooth real-sports feel. Hitting the emotional high notes that come with pro wrestling will be the next step.
JBL is suddenly the most interesting man in wrestling after showing up at AAA and last week closing TNA’s Emergence show by whispering something in heavyweight champion Nic Nemeth’s ear, certainly adding some intrigue to the top of the card.
Kudos to Anna Jay for going out of her comfort zone for a tour with Stardom. It’s those types of experiences that truly allow performers to improve and evolve. Intrigued to see how she is brought back into the fold in AEW.
Drew McIntyre and CM Punk are probably heading for a trilogy-finishing Hell in a Cell match over a friendship bracelet. I’d rather see WWE have the blow-off on a big Raw and not use a third straight precious PLE spot on the feud.
Gunther, WWE
Bash in Berlin’s main event was a bit of a slog, but it didn’t take away from what Gunther showed in that match, hanging every step of the way with Orton on his way to gaining a passing of the torch victory. Gunther needed it to solidify himself as a true main-eventer. Gunther’s whole persona is about dominating and beating opponents cleanly one way or the other, and that’s exactly what he did in Berlin.
Bryan Danielson (c.) vs. Jack Perry for the AEW World championship, All In (Saturday, 8 p.m., Bleacher Report, Triller)
This likely won’t be the end of Danielson’s full-time career, but it is the biggest match of Jack Perry’s career. Perry has seemingly come into his own with his Scapegoat character. Now we will see if he can hang in the main event and have the high-quality match everyone else seems to have with Danielson. If he does, it will certainly leave a real impression that he can be trusted with these opportunities in the future, when it finally is his time to ascend.