A Pro Wrestling Boom is Coming in 2021

I really, really, really want to go back to a wrestling show, and I don’t think I’m the only one.

For all the talk about falling ratings and empty arenas across sports, no “sport” has been more impacted than pro wrestling. That’s because pro wrestling is a sport only in the sense that they are judges for each match and those judges are the thousands of fans watching.

Once COVID-19 ran over the world, pro wrestling was forced to adapt and it hasn’t always been pretty. WWE has been running empty arena shows for a year and a half now, their disastrous ratings saved by their Thunderdome concept — essentially the best-looking Zoom call in human history.

All Elite Wrestling (AEW) has been running an outdoor venue for the same period of time, using other wrestlers as “fans” to make noise, as only about 1,000 actual fans at most have been allowed to attend. Smaller promotions with less money, like MLW and Impact Wrestling, have only run shows in empty TV spaces.

It’s been brutal. Though there have been many great matches and interesting angles, it hasn’t been the same. It’s almost insane to think about what has happened to the industry. I was at the first AEW TV show in Washington, D.C. in October 2019 with about 10,000 of my closest friends and the energy that night harkened back to The Rock and Stone Cold…