Chris Jericho has a theory to explain the recent ratings decline in his former longtime stomping grounds of WWE.
The leader of The Inner Circle in All Elite Wrestling recently appeared as a guest on Busted Open Radio for an in-depth interview covering all things pro wrestling.
During his appearance on the popular pro wrestling program, "Le Champion" spoke about AEW creating new stars and how WWE is failing to do the same, which he feels is the key contributing factor to point to when looking at the recent decline in television ratings experienced by the company.
Featured below is an excerpt from the interview where "The Demo God" touches on this particular topic.
Our goal from the start was to make new stars. Because that’s what wrestling’s all about. It always has been. If you look at last week’s show, where we had Jungle Boy vs. Darby Allin in the main event, we had Shida vs. Tay Conti in a main event. Those are two kinds of fence post matches on our show and they both did a great number.
We’ve made Darby Allin into a legit main event draw. I mean last night he’s in the main event with Ten for God’s sake and it will probably do a good number. I give us a full Barry Horowitz pat on the back for that because we set out to do it and we did it. It’s not hard to do; pick the right guy and just stick with them. We paired Darby with Sting, so he got that rub. And now Sting is almost, I’m not going to say lackey, but he’s almost Darby’s second at this point. And that’s probably exactly what he should be.
If you look at what we’ve done with Jericho, MJF, Sammy Guevara, Santana and Ortiz, Wardlow, that’s another aspect. We are building these guys and girls because it just can’t be Jericho vs. Cody, vs. Kenny over and over again. Nor would we want it to be.
When Vince goes to the investors (during the conference call) and says ‘the Raw ratings are down because we haven’t created any new stars, that’s completely on you guys! We (AEW) knew from the start we had to make stars. A lot of the guys on our show, Bucks, and Kenny included, Hangman Page; I said it on the Broken Skull Sessions, they weren’t known on a national level. On a national network television level. We’ve built them up, and then suddenly all these kinds of the second wave of guys and girls are getting in there.
Check out the complete episode of Busted Open Radio featuring the Chris Jericho interview at Apple.com. H/T to WrestleTalk.com for transcribing the above quotes.
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