He Would Know. Vince McMahon On Injuries Harming WWE’s TV Ratings.

The boss speaks. WWE is of course a business, meaning at the end of the day they have to make business decisions. Some of these may not be the most popular in the world, but at the same time there are a few moves that are beyond their control. Sometimes fans aren’t sure how WWE sees the moves they’re making, but every now and then we get to see the moves from a rather important perspective.

The WWE held its annual fourth quarter 2018 financial conference call, which featured comments from Vince McMahon himself. McMahon blamed a lot of the company’s recent troubles on a string of injuries and wrestlers being absent in general, including some such as John Cena who has mainly been away from the company due to his Hollywood commitments. Here are McMahon comments, with transcription courtesy of Wrestlinginc.com:

“The unfortunate aspect of sometimes in our business, is that we… our performers are not cartoons. They get hurt. This year, leading up to where we are now, we’ve had an inornate number of injuries. And when you have injuries… you know, there’s a whole bunch of them. Roman Reigns being the principle among them. And even John Cena, not an injury type thing but we thought we were going to have John be more of a part of our programming than we do.

“John, God bless him, is making more movies. And even John, I would think, would say, ‘Geez, I thought I was going to spend more time with what I love to do,’ which is WWE. So, he’s been coming in and out, he’s not really a part of out storyline. You lose John, you lose Roman Reigns. In addition to that, we’ve had injuries… Sasha Banks, Becky Lynch, who is one of our top female performers, was injured. Kevin Owens, Sami Zayn, Bray Wyatt, Charlotte Flair, Alexa Bliss, Braun Strowman, Dean Ambrose, Ember Moon, Samoa Joe, Akam from a new tag team, Jason Jordan, Fandango, Big Show, Seth Rollins.

“It’s like we… you had all these injuries, which is really unusual for us, and they’re characters. It’s no different if you’re writing a soap opera and all of a sudden your main character wasn’t there. You’re in the middle of production, what do you do? You very nimbly change the storyline, but it’s not as good as the original one. Sometimes it is better because we’re pretty good at it, but those are things that we’re faced with, and one of the reasons why television ratings have dropped.

“And one of the reasons, obviously, from a live event standpoint, that’s dropped too. Because if you don’t have your favorites on television, obviously you can’t see the at a live event either. We’re wide open and Ronda’s done an extraordinary job. There will be other individuals coming from different areas that will join us on a longterm basis, that will help us as well.”

McMahon and Cena have a history. Check out when McMahon tried to get rid of Cena in the first place:

Raw: Mr. McMahon prepares to terminate John Cena

Opinion: It’s very true that the injuries haven’t done WWE any favors, with a lot of talent missing a lot of time in a hurry. Reigns is definitely the biggest of them all with so much of Monday Night Raw built around him and then one day he’s just gone out of nowhere. WWE needs to build up some fresh names and that’s going to take some time. The problem is they don’t have much time before the move to FOX and that’s going to be an issue as things get closer.

Do you agree with McMahon’s comments? Which injuries hurt the most? Let us know in the comments below.

Thomas Hall has been a wrestling fan for over thirty years and has seen over 50,000 wrestling matches. He has also been a wrestling reviewer since 2009 with over 5,000 full shows covered. You can find his work at kbwrestlingreviews.com, or check out his Amazon author page with 28 wrestling books. His latest book is the the Complete 1997 Monday Night Raw Reviews.

Get the latest and greatest in professional wrestling news by signing up for our daily email newsletter. Just look below for “GET EXCLUSIVE UPDATES” to sign up. We are proud to offer our popular Wrestling Rumors app and encourage you to download it for an optimized user experience. It is available for Android and also on iOS. Thank you for reading!