Glenn Gilbertti Predicts Continued Fall Of RAW Ratings

In an interview with Vince Russo and WrestlingInc, Glenn “Disco Inferno” Gilbertti spoke about RAW’s ratings, Brock Lesnar and more. Here are highlights:

On how the business is different now: “Everything now is match quality, work, work rate, work, regardless of what the guys look like [and] regardless of how the guys talk. All the people care about is how good is the match,” Gilbertti claimed. “And as match quality became the driving force in professional wrestling, these guys that were good workers and stuff, nobody cared that they, like, can’t interview; they don’t have any charisma; [and] they don’t have a gimmick. They’re just guys out there wrestling each other. And as this mindset, I call it, infested, the business, it changed what we’re supposed to be watching wrestling for. Wrestling is supposed to be a male soap opera. What happened to the male soap opera with the melodrama and the personal issues between two guys on a personal level, where it evolved each week through storytelling? The matches were secondary. The matches were an interlude to progress the story. The storylines drove the shows.”

On WWE’s ratings woes: “[WWE] are losing 10% of their audience every year! To the point, next year, I’m predicting right now, next year, at this time, we’re going to be below the 3-point or the 2.0. We’re going to be in the 1.9 because they are losing 10% of their audience every single year.”

On WWE creating new stars: “Bro, what’s going to change the business is guys, an individual that draws the audience. Like, we’ll go back and look at professional wrestling, but, bro, you could talk about [how] there has been a steady decline since ‘Stone Cold’ and The Rock have left the show,” Gilbertti stated. “When you can find people that can give you moments of brilliance in a show, you will have an increase in the audience because people will wait [through boring parts of the show] to see them. I think that’s the only thing that will change wrestling.”

On Brock Lesnar: “Today, who are those guys? Brock Lesnar? Bro, [WWE] have nobody for Brock Lesnar to fight against and Brock Lesnar can’t talk. He [has] to go out there like every week, regardless of how [much] you like Brock Lesnar, when he’s not wrestling he’s rerun television. He’s standing in the ring doing nothing and Paul Heyman’s cutting the same promo every single time. It’s just the words are different, barely different.”