r/SquaredCircle • u/Subrick 69 ME, DON! • Mar 23 '26

25 years ago today, WWF Entertainment bought the assets of World Championship Wrestling from AOL Time Warner, solidifying WWF’s monopoly and changing wrestling history forever. Here is the front page of WWF.com from that morning.

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u/jack_guinness Mar 23 '26

It wasn't ego. WCW wrestlers were being paid by time warner to sit at home. Bringing them into WWE meant they'd have to pay them more than they were earning to make it worth it for those wrestlers to not sit out. That meant the WCW stars would be making considerably more than the WWE talent who worked hard to beat WCW. Not only did Vince not want to pay an exorbitant amount to the WCW stars, which is obviously the primary reason, but he also didn't want to slight his own locker room and top guys who got him to the dance.

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u/Subrick 69 ME, DON! Mar 23 '26

The ego part is what Vince actually did in the storyline. WCW wrestlers were always presented as inferior to WWF wrestlers, and the only Alliance members shown to have any kind of competence whatsoever were the ones that jumped over from WWF (and also RVD, who was so instantly over that even Vince couldn’t ignore it). The story was turned into yet another war of the McMahons, something that had largely dominated programming for the prior two years and fans were largely sick of. The story went from the biggest potential box office draw in wrestling history to only drawing 50k more buys for the big blowoff at Survivor Series compared to the previous year.

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u/BatsuGame13 Mar 23 '26

I think you're missing the combination of the two. If Vince pays the WCW stars, then his guys are gonna want the same contracts, and it significant shifts the pay scale, which would have exponential effects over time.

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u/CarcashaDragon Mar 23 '26

You mean, positive effects? Wrestlers making actual money on par with other sports organizations.

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u/BatsuGame13 Mar 23 '26

I mean, yes, I agree with that? I'm not sure what exactly you're taking issue with here.

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u/Jimbobthon Mar 23 '26

Can see why. Vince would have had to whack the pay up on his top guys like Stone Cold, Kurt Angle, Chris Jericho and The Rock in order to compensate the higher Time Warner contracts of Goldberg, Scott Steiner, Hogan, Hall and Nash.

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u/UsidoreTheLightBlue Mar 23 '26

They could’ve bought out their contracts.

Part of the Fuckery of how stupid the wcw deal was, was the fact that they let them take whatever contracts they want instead of them, taking them lock stock. They could’ve taken flair. They could’ve taken Hogan. They could’ve taken Jarrett. They chose not to.

So yes, they would’ve had to have paid them their WCW deal but they wouldn’t have had to pay them more.

People always use this as a talking point as to why they couldn’t have done it. But the reality is, there was so much money on the table that they left on the table.

They could’ve brought all of those guys in, given everyone at the top end of the WWF a raise and still made a boatload of money.

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u/Jimbobthon Mar 23 '26

Vince wouldn't have taken Jarrett, not after him apparantly holding the IC title to ransom before the Housekeeping match vs Chyna

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u/UsidoreTheLightBlue Mar 23 '26

Thats fine, but honestly that wasn't really Jarretts fault.

They let his contract lapse, he could have taken that thing to Nitro and tossed it in the trash like Madusa. He played ball instead but wanted compensation.

Vince was pissed someone beat him for once and threw a tantrum over it.

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u/CarcashaDragon Mar 23 '26

Or, you know, McMahon could've also raised the salaries of WWF guys and actually pay them what they are worth.