WWE Rumors: Reason why Rey Mysterio was booked to lose US title finally revealed
It's quite rare to see a title change hands at a live event but that's exactly what happened at the Boxing Day special at the Madison Square Garden on December 26th.
Andrade defeated Rey Mysterio to become the new WWE United States Champion at the show.
On the latest edition of the Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer opened up about the reason behind the decision to take the title off Mysterio at the live event.
Meltzer stated that that plan was always to have a title change at a live event to build up house shows again, the attendance of which has taken a drop in recent years,
The MSG show kickstarted the holiday tour and the company wanted to get some degree of legitimacy to the live event circuit.
It was also revealed that the plan is to have Andrade get into a US title programme with Humberto Carrillo. Rey Mysterio is also expected to be involved in the title picture for some time, however, the Master of the 619 is being pushed into the main event storyline.
The main angle on RAW is to have Kevin Owens, Samoa Joe and Mysterio feud against Seth Rollins and AOP.
Meltzer explained:
This is like a plan, to do title changes at the house shows to help build up the house shows again. Kind of wish maybe like it was not in the Garden, maybe it was like in Baltimore, where are they tonight? RAW crew tonight was in, umm, what’s it? Baltimore?
And there was Toronto, and umm, let me see. Baltimore was the RAW. So yeah, tonight like in Baltimore, they could have done it. A part of me was like, well, the Garden to them is special, the show the day after Christmas at the Garden is a big one, they had a big crowd. 12,000 people. And, they gave them that (title change). This is long-term stuff.
So the gist of the Andrade win, you can tell is to get that US title programme and Rey, they will be doing stuff with Rey, but in the long run, it’s Humberto Carrillo, who has got two wins over Andrade. And so, there is the whole thing with Andrade and Zelina in there with Carrillo. And then the main programme is going to be Seth and the AOP against Rey.
They want the main programme to be Rey, Samoa Joe, and Kevin Owens against Seth and the AOP. That may not be shot on Monday, although we’ve already sort of have shot it, you know they beat up Rey at the end, they had Joe there and Kevin Owens gets beat up by them every week anyway. So you can see it all tying together already. So that’s kind of like the big main event direction, and of course, you’ve got the wedding, Bobby Lashley and Lana wedding. Hopefully it’s creative.