WWE's Italian holiday was a logistical nightmare

WWE touched down in Italy this week for Clash in Italy, and frankly, some of the booking felt like it was scribbled on the back of a napkin in a Milanese cafe. While the crowd was electric—they always are over there, God bless them—the actual show suffered from enough filler to make a late-night talk show host blush.

We are still reeling from how certain matches were positioned on the card. When your main event doesn't hit until the absolute dead of heart-burn hour, you know someone in production fell asleep at the wheel. It wasn't just the pacing, either. Certain transitions between segments felt like watching someone try to parallel park a semi-truck in a Roman alleyway.

The AAA Noche de los Grandes reality check

Meanwhile, the AAA Noche de los Grandes event actually brought the heat that WWE lacked. Watching AAA operate right now is like watching a chef who refuses to use a recipe but somehow ends up with a Michelin star anyway. The sheer chaos of the lucha style is exactly what we need when the mainstream product starts to feel like a corporate seminar.

The contrast between the two promotions this week was stark. WWE was all about scale and entrance production, while AAA was about hitting people hard and fast. If you prefer your wrestling to feel like a high-budget action movie that forgot the script, WWE had you covered. If you wanted, you know, actual wrestling, AAA delivered.

Winners and losers from the week of June 2

Let's talk about why some of these performers are trending for the wrong reasons. We have stars coming off these shows with zero momentum because they were either stuck in non-finish purgatory or shoved into matches with the emotional stakes of a toaster oven. It’s hard to build a household name when you’re trading wins in a five-minute heat-seeker that exists solely to get to a commercial break.

Here is where the talent currently stands in the messy, shifting sands of these promotions:

  • The undisputed winner is absolutely anyone who managed to walk out of that Italian arena without a concussion or a ruined gimmick.
  • The losers are the fans who had to endure multiple segment delays that felt longer than the wait for a table at a tourist-trap trattoria.

The booking of mid-card title matches remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma that nobody asked for. We keep seeing guys who should be main-eventing getting relegated to the opening slot, while legacy talent gets an extra ten minutes of mic time to say absolutely nothing. The product feels like it is stuck holding a clipboard when it should be swinging a chair.

Look, I get the need for international growth. But when you sacrifice the flow of your television show for the sake of a photo op, the audience at home gets screwed. I’d rather have a tight, two-hour show that packs a wallop than a bloated, four-hour extravaganza where the performers are clearly exhausted by the time the bell rings for the main event.

Maybe we’ll see some course correction once the summer season fully kicks off. Until then, we’re left analyzing why some of the best athletes on the planet are being hampered by these bizarre, disjointed creative decisions. It’s not complex—let the wrestlers wrestle and stop over-producing the moments that don’t need the extra gloss.