9 Lessons That AEW Can Learn From WCW

From the moment the company was created, AEW has garnered a lot of comparisons to the defunct wrestling promotion, World Championship Wrestling. Similar to WCW two decades ago, AEW is currently the WWE’s most prominent competition.

In a sense, AEW is very lucky that WCW died. First, the collapse of WCW left the door open for another promotion to take its place in the United States’ pro wrestling scene. Second, the death of WCW now provides AEW with a blueprint on what not to do if they want to be successful. The following is a list of lessons that AEW can learn from the late, maybe-not-so-great, WCW.

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9 AEW Should Not Kill Kayfabe Like WCW

In the later years of WCW, Vince Russo and the rest of the creative team got very experimental. The New Blood Rising PPV is one of the most infamous examples of this. WCW tried to pull back the curtain and make backstage issues in WCW into an actual storyline when they had Goldberg walk out in the middle of a three-way match against Kevin Nash and Scott Steiner. As he walked away, commentary explained to the audience that this wasn’t planned and that Steiner and Nash would now have to “improvise a finish.”

This storyline and all others like it were jumbled messes. They took away from the quality of WCW’s matches and precluded the chance of any actual compelling stories happening.

8 AEW Shouldn’t Overdo It With Insulting WWE

The era of the Monday Night Wars remains one of the most exciting times to have been a wrestling fan. WCW saw great success during this period, defeating WWE in ratings for 83 infamous weeks. While this time saw WCW create some of its best television, it also inspired some of its worst ideas.

RELATED: Every Active Wrestler Who Formerly Wrestled In WCW, Ranked Worst To BestThe West Hollywood Blondes and Oklahoma are undoubtedly the most egregious gimmicks in the category. The former were a homophobic parody of the Hollywood Blondes (a team that WWE's main star Steve Austin was once a part of) while the latter was a heinous mockery of commentator Jim Ross and his Bell's Palsy.

7 AEW Needs To Keep Match Stipulations Simple

WCW had a lot of matches that seemed really cool in theory, but turned out to be big messes once they were brought to life. Some examples that come to mind are the Chambers of Horror match, the King of the Road match at Uncensored 1995, the Doomsday Cage Match at Uncensored 1996, and the Triple Cage match at Slamboree (2000).

The rules of all of these matches are all much too complicated to fit into this article; the point we're trying to make, though, is that over-complicated stipulations only work to confuse the audience and make the athletes’ jobs more difficult. There’s nothing wrong with sticking to the fundamentals when it comes to match structure, especially with a roster as athletic as AEW’s.

6 You Don’t Put Everything On A Pole

Vince Russo had a weird fixation on “[blank] on a Pole” matches. He booked dozens of these matches during his tenure in WCW; some items and people who were put on poles include a piñata, Buff Bagwell’s mother (technically on a forklift but really the same idea), a key to a cage holding Torrie Wilson, and a bottle of Viagra. Tony Khan probably knows not to book matches like this, but there’s no harm in a reminder.

5 AEW Need To Keep Egos In Check

Wrestling is full of big egos, so this lesson is likely the hardest one on the list to adhere to. A lot of the men with the most extensive creative control in WCW let their egos do the booking for them. Vince Russo, for example, booked himself to become WCW World Heavyweight Champion.

Tony Khan should keep in mind that not everyone can go over. Some wrestlers’ egos might need to be bruised in order to keep the show running smoothly.

4 AEW Needs To Limit Outside Interference During Matches

During the Monday Night Wars, outside interference during WCW programming was a regular occurrence. It essentially got to a point where a clean match was more of a surprise than run-ins were. Matches began to lose their value as fans began to realize that the action in the ring didn’t matter; the nWo was inevitably going to ruin it anyway.

3 AEW Cannot Make A Celebrity The World Champion

David Arquette becoming WCW World Heavyweight Champion remains one of the worst booking decisions ever made, even two decades later. The idea behind the decision was that it would attract more attention to WCW’s product and consequently make more fans. In the end, all it did was damage Arquette’s reputation as an actor and upset a lot of the more deserving wrestlers backstage. As fun as the idea of Shaquille O’Neal as AEW Champion is, it wouldn’t work out in the long run.

2 AEW Can't Overexert Their Wrestlers (& Fans)

The creation of WCW’s second weekly television show, Thunder, is seen by many as the beginning of the end for WCW. It overexposed the WCW product and made the promotion run through its storylines twice as fast. This meant that in just a few months’ time, the creative team was scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas. This explains the quality (or lack thereof) of late WCW storylines.

AEW is still managing to keep up with two weekly TV shows, but with another show potentially on the way, they should be careful when it comes to overexertion.

1 Build Young Stars; Don’t Rely On Old Names

By the time WCW went out of business in 2001, the company really only had three big, homegrown stars: Booker T, Scott Steiner and Diamond Dallas Page. Three big stars obviously isn’t enough to make a promotion of WCW’s size thrive. Unfortunately, WCW focused most of its attention on older, ex-WWE stars like Hulk Hogan, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash, all of whom were too past their prime to carry a franchise.

Ironically, AEW’s reliance on Jericho hints that they might have a similar problem down the road. However, they’re also doing a good job building young stars like Jungle Boy, MJF, and House of Black's Julia Hart to name a few.