Posted in: Sports, TV, WWE | Tagged: Seth Rollins, wrestling, wwe

Seth Rollins Says Building New WWE Stars Takes Patience

There's been a lot of talk recently about WWE's need to build new stars. It comes up every quarter these days when WWE does its conference calls with investors, and they want to know why the company is bleeding ratings. You gotta build those new stars. Any day now, those new stars will be built, and everything will turn around. A lot of people might suggest that WWE really should have been thinking of that for the past twenty years, but hindsight is 20/20, after all.

But in the here and now, WWE is in a position where it doesn't have stars with the same drawing power as even Roman Reigns or John Cena, much less Steve Austin, The Rock, or Hulk Hogan. And the guys left who can still hobble into a ring from the 1990s are dwindling along with WWE's ever-declining ratings. But in an interview with TalkSport, Seth Rollins says all WWE fans need is just a little patience.

"I think the emphasis is still on building stars for the future," said Rollins when asked if Paul Heyman's firing as creative director of WWE Monday Night Raw has affected WWE's plans to make new stars. "Particularly during this time when there's a lot of performers who are either opting out for their own safety or they are people that are getting sick here and there, so we're missing a lot of our top-tier talent due to various circumstances."

All of those various circumstances named have to do with the coronavirus pandemic, and, until recently, WWE's refusal to take the pandemic seriously. At one time, there were reportedly 30 positive COVID-19 cases in WWE, which didn't begin actually testing people for the virus until June.

"But the emphasis is still certainly on building future stars, and I don't want Paul Heyman's departure to be a reason why anybody thinks that that's not the case because it definitely is the case," Rollins continued. "You have to be patient; there has to be a build; there has to be a story; it has to be the right time. You can't just put people on TV in prominent positions that nobody knows if you want casual viewers to continue to tune in," said Rollins of the process of making new stars. "It is a process; it's getting these guys ingratiated with the audience and the viewers who are not necessarily wrestling fans to then put them in positions to be stars."

It sounds like Seth Rollins has got this problem figured out. They don't call him the Monday Night Messiah for nothing.

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