The Corporate Guillotine Drops Again
Wade Keller and Jason Powell spent 137 minutes on their latest flagship podcast breaking down the current state of professional wrestling. Honestly, the conversation around TKO was incredibly depressing. We need to stop pretending that the new WWE ownership group is anything other than a ruthless corporate machine. The latest round of roster cuts proves it definitively.
For decades, Vince McMahon was the clear villain of professional wrestling. You could point to his erratic booking, his weird obsessions, and his petty grudges. But at least McMahon was a wrestling guy at his core. TKO operates like a private equity firm that bought your favorite local hardware store and is slowly selling off the copper wire.
They are slashing contracts just to make the quarterly earnings report look a fraction of a percent better for Wall Street. We keep losing talented workers who are barely making a dent in TKO’s massive profit margins. It is exhausting to watch talented people lose their livelihoods while the company brags to shareholders about record-breaking gate receipts.
Keller and Powell explicitly asked if TKO are the villains of this era. The answer is an undeniable yes. When you are generating billions in revenue and you still feel the need to fire midcard talent and office staff, you are the bad guy. There is no spinning it.
Let's really look at these TKO roster cuts. We are not just talking about guys who have been sitting in catering for three years. We are talking about producers, backstage interviewers, and ring crew. Firing them to hit a financial benchmark is gross.
It completely destroys morale. Imagine being a wrestler right now. You go out there, risk your neck, sell merchandise, and put on a five-star match. But you know that an executive who has never taken a bump might cut you tomorrow to balance the books. That anxiety bleeds through the screen. You can see it in how safe and sanitized some of the midcard matches have become.
"TKO operates like a private equity firm that bought your favorite local hardware store and is slowly selling off the copper wire."
This corporate greed bleeds directly into the new "Club WWE" initiative. The monetization of every single aspect of the fan experience is reaching absolute parody levels. They want you to pay premium prices for basic access.
You can't just buy a decent ticket anymore. You have to buy a "platinum hospitality experience" that includes a cheap lanyard, a cold hot dog, and a brief wave from a retired mid-carder. Some of these packages are running over $2,500 for a standard premium live event. The barrier to entry for a working-class family to attend a show is completely out of control. It feels like TKO is actively trying to price out the very fans who kept the company afloat during the lean years.
The Bloodline Civil War: Roman Reigns and Jacob Fatu
Moving away from the boardroom and into the ring, the podcast touched on the pros and cons of integrating Jacob Fatu deeper into the Roman Reigns orbit. On paper, it sounds like printing money. Fatu is an absolute force of nature who moves like a cruiserweight and hits like a heavyweight.
But the Bloodline storyline is already insanely crowded. You have Roman, Solo Sikoa, the Usos constantly hovering, and the rest of the family tree involved. Throwing Fatu into this bubbling cauldron risks diluting what makes him special in the first place. He doesn't need to be just another background heavy for the Tribal Chief.
If you look back at how they handled Solo Sikoa's debut at Clash at the Castle, it was perfect. He was the enforcer who swung the match. But Solo eventually got exposed when he had to carry the microphone. Jacob Fatu does not have that problem. He can talk, he is terrifying, and he connects with the crowd instantly.
That is why keeping him as a lackey for Roman is a massive mistake. If you put them in the ring together, Fatu is going to eclipse Reigns. Roman wrestles a very deliberate, slow, psychological style. Fatu is a human car crash. The clash of styles is fascinating, but WWE will absolutely protect Roman at Fatu's expense.
The biggest con here is pacing and presentation. WWE has a horrible habit of rushing shiny new toys into the main event scene before the audience is properly introduced to them. Fatu needs time to establish his own terrifying identity on the main roster.
If he just becomes another guy wearing a black t-shirt and throwing up the one finger in the background of promos, it is a massive waste of his generational potential. We saw him destroy people in MLW. He needs to bring that same unhinged, violent energy to SmackDown, not just stand behind Roman looking tough.
There is also the glaring question of Roman's schedule. Reigns is barely around as it is. Building a massive angle between him and Fatu means relying on weeks of pre-taped promos and proxy wars. If they are going to do Roman versus Fatu, Roman actually needs to show up to work.
The Oba Femi Problem Nobody Wants to Admit
Down in NXT, Oba Femi is holding the North American Championship hostage, and I mean that in the worst way possible. Powell brought up the "Oba Femi problem," and it is something the NXT booking committee needs to address immediately before the crowd turns completely apathetic.
Here is the core issue: Femi is booked as an unstoppable, video game final boss. He throws regular-sized humans into the third row. It looks fantastic in a ten-second social media clip, but it makes for terrible, predictable television over a long period. When a champion never shows any actual vulnerability, the matches lose all of their dramatic tension.
Who is actually supposed to beat this guy? Shawn Michaels and the NXT creative team have painted themselves into a corner. If a plucky smaller wrestler rolls him up for a surprise three-count, it makes Femi look stupid and weak. If he just vacates the title to move up to the main roster, it massively devalues the championship.
Monster pushes always have an extremely short shelf life. Think back to Ryback's initial run or early Braun Strowman. Once the giant actually has to sell a headlock or get put in a submission, the invincible illusion shatters instantly.
Look at the history of the North American Championship. It was built by guys like Carmelo Hayes, Johnny Gargano, and Wes Lee. Those guys put on incredibly dramatic, high-paced matches where the momentum swung back and forth. Oba Femi just crushes people. It completely changes the dynamic of the title, and not for the better.
If you are a smaller guy on the NXT roster right now, what is your motivation? You know you cannot beat Femi. You know the front office is heavily invested in his success. It makes the entire midcard division feel pointless. They are just lining up bodies for Femi to toss around.
Femi needs to start having competitive wrestling matches where he actually looks like he might lose. He needs a rival who can push him past the 15-minute mark. If he keeps doing squash matches disguised as title defenses, the NXT audience is going to get bored and turn on him completely.
Darby Allin's Precarious Reign at the Top
Let's shift gears to AEW, because Darby Allin holding the AEW World Championship is still taking some major getting used to. Keller sounded highly skeptical about the long-term viability of this reign, and it is hard to disagree with his assessment. Darby is a fantastic underdog, but underdogs traditionally make terrible long-term champions.
The entire appeal of the Darby Allin character is the chase. It is watching a guy who weighs barely 170 pounds take a beating that would end a normal man's career, only to hit a desperate Coffin Drop out of nowhere. When he actually has the belt, the dynamic completely flips.
He suddenly has to be the mountain that challengers try to climb, and that just doesn't fit his daredevil persona. You cannot book a world champion to get squashed for twenty minutes every single week. It makes the entire promotion look weak and unconvincing.
"A world champion needs to dictate the pace and have substantial offense. Right now, Darby looks like he is merely surviving his title defenses rather than actually winning them."
We saw this exact same booking disaster in 2006 when WWE put their world title on Rey Mysterio. They booked him as a champion who constantly lost non-title matches and barely scraped by in his defenses. It ruined his reign. AEW is dangerously close to making the exact same mistake with Darby right now.
With Double or Nothing coming up fast on May 24, AEW needs to figure out exactly what this title reign is supposed to accomplish. Is Darby just a transitional champion meant to pop a rating and sell some skateboards, or is Tony Khan actually committing to him as the face of the franchise?
If it is the latter, they need to fundamentally change how his matches are structured. A world champion needs to dictate the pace and have substantial offense. Right now, Darby looks like he is merely surviving his title defenses rather than actually winning them. He needs a dominant, clean win over a top-tier opponent to legitimize this run.
The Reality of the Modern Wrestling Business
We are just a few days away from WWE Backlash on May 9, and the contrast between the two major companies has never been more obvious. WWE is a hyper-polished, publicly traded behemoth that will fire your favorite midcarder to save a few pennies on catering. AEW is putting their top prize on a guy who routinely jumps off balconies into glass tables for fun.
Both approaches have massive, glaring flaws. TKO’s ruthless corporate efficiency is actively sucking the soul out of the WWE product. The roster cuts send a terrible message to the locker room: no matter how hard you work, you are just a number on a spreadsheet waiting to be erased.
Meanwhile, AEW’s chaotic booking often makes their champions feel like total afterthoughts. When Darby Allin is defending his title, it rarely feels like the most important thing on the television show. The Keller and Powell podcast perfectly nailed the frustration that a lot of dedicated fans are feeling right now about both companies.
Wrestling is undeniably in a boom period financially. Gate receipts are up, television rights deals are massive, and social media engagement is through the roof. But creatively, it feels like both major promotions are walking on a very thin tightrope right now.
Whether it is figuring out how to handle the inevitable Roman Reigns and Jacob Fatu collision, solving the Oba Femi booking trap in NXT, or deciding if Darby Allin is a legitimate main event draw, the margin for error is shrinking every single week. TKO might be the undisputed villains of the story right now, but AEW needs to make sure they are actually offering a compelling alternative, not just a chaotic, disorganized mess.
