CM Punk said on Stephanie McMahon’s podcast that WWE’s current management is far more forgiving of young talent than it was under the old regime, and that wrestlers used to get fired over something as small as bad-looking punches. JBL does not dispute the point. He just thinks the reason is less about Vince McMahon than about what a wrestler used to arrive with.
“I think they’re more accommodating now because the learning process is different,” JBL said on Something to Wrestle, where he is filling in as host.
His argument is that the men and women McMahon was evaluating had already done the work somewhere else.
“By the time a guy got to Vince, they had had, like I’d had, several thousand matches, or a couple thousand matches in different territories. You expect the guy to be able to know how to work and be able to be pretty good at what he does. You might want to refine it,” JBL said. “Everybody got refined to some degree, and everybody got overwhelmed to some degree, when all of a sudden you have this huge WWE product and that’s not where you’re used to working. So there was a little bit of leash there that you got with Vince, no matter who you are. But I think Vince had a shorter patience leash on them, because he expected them to be able to do things.”
That expectation no longer holds, because the pipeline changed.
“Now they’re coming up from NXT. They don’t have thousands of matches, or a thousand matches, in different territories around the world. At least not 90-something percent of them don’t,” JBL said. “So you have to have more patience, and I think that’s been more of it than anything else. The learning process keeps going in WWE. It kept going for us too, but we came with a much easier, better base than what guys are coming from now.”
JBL was clear about who he thinks has the tougher road.
“It’s much harder on guys today and girls today. We had it much easier, because by the time we got there, we had had so many matches in so many different territories. They don’t have that,” JBL said. “So I think you need to have that patience with them once they get there, and I think that’s what you’re seeing.”
Asked whether the current regime views talent who speak English as a second language differently than McMahon did, given how far someone like Penta has been pushed, JBL again pointed to the business rather than the man.
“Yeah, maybe. It’s tough, because you got to be able to cut promos, and before, so much of our revenue was dependent upon North America, specifically from the Rio Grande up. Our pay-per-view buys were the biggest things almost that we had,” JBL said. “But now your TV revenue is worldwide. It’s truly global, and that’s why you can have pay-per-views, now called PLEs, in different countries, because it’s all streaming. You don’t have to worry about people buying pay-per-views in North America, specifically the U.S. and Canada, to get the main revenue out of your company. Now the revenue is already there because of streaming.”
His conclusion was that the shift is structural.
“So I think it’s not Vince. I think it’s the idea of where you’re getting your revenue from has changed,” JBL said.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/4SI1dbfg11hTg4ILn9e9Yu?si=456f169334bd4801
