10 changes to expect when Vince McMahon is done with the WWE
Vince McMahon has been involved with pro wrestling for decades, and he has managed to transform WWE from another regional wrestling promotion into a global sports entertainment phenomenon. But not all of his decisions and mindsets have been well-received.
Vince is over 70 years old, and many people have criticized him for many questionable booking decisions he has made, especially over the past decade or so. Most people recall when he appeared on the Stone Cold Podcast, on which Austin criticized him very deeply for many of his approaches and poorly-presented explanations for why he was doing certain things.
Among these supposed justifications, Vince lambasted ‘millennials’ for not working as hard as their predecessors, and claimed that Cesaro wasn’t connecting ‘because he’s Swiss’. These are but a few of the many problems that Vince’s mindset has produced.
There has long been demand by some people that Vince ought to retire, with the most common reason for this demand being that he is ‘out-of-touch’ with his fans. There is a lot of evidence to support this claim, but Vince himself has stated that he has no plans on retiring anytime soon, and is likely to follow the Big Van Vader approach, in that he will die doing what he loves before stepping down.
With all that said, Vince’s will leave WWE eventually (he is not immortal, no matter what he says), and when that happens, there will be significant changes in WWE. Here are ten things that once can expect to change in WWE once Vince McMahon leaves.
#10 Less plugging and advertising in-show
WWE under Vince McMahon is notorious for its overt and shameless plugging of various products and services. On any given show, WWE’s commentators (and sometimes even the wrestlers themselves) will plug one of WWE’s sponsor’s products/services, and in other cases, they will even hock those products in a segment.
It’s almost as if WWE sees its wrestlers as free models for various products, and they – under Vince’s guidance – order these wrestlers to try and sell these various products (instead of trying to sell the storylines those wrestlers may actually find themselves involved in).
But once Vince leaves WWE, this approach to marketing might disappear. If Triple H’s NXT is any indication of WWE’s future, then this blatant attempt at product marketing might disappear in favour of more subtle and less overt practices. While the normal 30-second spot where they say, ‘this show is brought to you by X’ might stay because it’s relatively harmless, the overt style where wrestlers sell products themselves will disappear.
This is because Triple H and company believe in real storylines that let fans invest in and understand. If you put a random product in there, it kills the story and prevents it from being sold and told properly. Triple H understands this, which is why his NXT stars avoid that style of marketing altogether.