Just a brutal two days for WWE. The passing of the Fink alongside the release of twenty-three (twenty-three!!!) on screen personnel is awful.
Just read about this, they released all those wrestlers right after being granted the ability to continue to make the live show and be considered "essential" which makes WWE look really really bad. But it's not the first time the company has looked so poorly.
They look really bad in this case. For wrestlers like Sarah Logan and No Way Jose, they had to fly out to Florida on Monday to lose to Shayna Bazsler and Bobby Lashley respectively, then got fired two days later. It also came out that some money from WWE was used to fund the now bankrupt XFL when Vince originally said that WWE had nothing to do with the XFL this time. And he also had said that WWE had enough money in the bank to survive this year without much revenue and would still turn in a profit, so these releases really came out of left field. Among those released was Rusev, who a few weeks ago had pledged 20,000 dollars of his own money to the production crew that was stuck at home not getting paid. There are a lot of moving parts to this story, but WWE and Vince McMahon look pretty bad in this case, and I've already seen a lot of backlash from fans and wrestlers alike, with cancelled network subscriptions and calls for unionization coming left and right. This could end up being ugly for the company, and tbh, they would probably deserve it. Between these releases, forcing their guys and girls to work what is basically a contact sport during a pandemic, the Saudi Arabia blood money deal, and years of obvious mistreatment of employees, it looks like a lot of people have finally had enough. The illusion of WWE being a wrestler's paradise is gone, and with companies like NJPW and AEW being able to offer a decent living for better treatment, I would not be surprised if up and coming wrestlers opt to not go to WWE and established superstars start walking away from the company. This pandemic is gonna be the impetus for a lot of change in the world, and WWE may be one of the biggest victims of a shifting perception of the way the world works.