Drew Cordeiro On How AEW and WWE Have Impacted Beyond Wrestling, Evolving the Product

Drew Cordeiro’s Beyond Wrestling has become one of the top indy wrestling companies in the US, and Cordeiro recently opened up on how WWE and AEW’s acquisition of talent has changed the scene. Cordeiro recently spoke with the North-South Connection and talked about how the two bigger companies’ recruiting of independent talent has created new challenges for him, and how Beyond has changed to move beyond those issues. You can check out some highlights from the discussion below, per Fightful:

On the impact that WWE and AEW have had on Beyond Wrestling: “I’m not going to dance around it, I think it has done more harm than good, at least immediately. Where it does good is, for example, when Wheeler Yuta puts out a tweet with his graphic saying he’s wrestling Timothy Thatcher, he now has more visibility than he ever would have had as an independent wrestler. Part of the complications come in having access to those wrestlers and making sure they’re able to promote their appearances. We’re very thankful we have a good relationship with AEW. In May, with our WWR+ event, we were able to get Willow Nightingale and Ashley D’Amboise to be part of the event at Fete Music when some of the other events like Black Label Pro and PWG lost wrestlers to the AEW Dark taping. It’s a two way street, to an extent, but it’s tough because it’s warped fan expectations. I like to ask questions online to gauge fan reactions and sometimes it’s to get an idea of what their expectations are.

“For example, we said Wheeler Yuta, who was originally scheduled to team with Tracy Williams against Ryan Clancy & Thomas Santell when he [Williams] was moved out of the match. ‘Okay, now Yuta must be teaming with Jon Moxley or wrestling Jon Moxley or teaming with Orange Cassidy or wrestling Orange Cassidy.’ On our end, we’re tapped out as far as access to AEW talent for the day, so we have to make sure to manage expectations because we don’t want fans to be disappointed. We want to under promise and over deliver. That’s one of the things that has kept Beyond Wrestling’s reputation and buzz about it in all of these different iterations. When a lot different wrestlers get called up, not everybody makes it, and it gives certain wrestlers a warped perspective of their value to both independent wrestling and all of pro wrestling. Maybe the most difficult competent of all of this is, we’ve lost access to so many veteran wrestlers that it’s almost created a bottleneck.”

On how the change in wrestling has affected the company: “A lot of what we see in independent wrestling right now, I don’t want to say it’s the blind leading the blind, but it’s people without a lot of experience trying to pass down the knowledge they have to people with even less experience. We don’t have some of the veterans we used to have access to that would improve the quality of the locker room, the quality of the shows, and a lot of wrestlers are now learning on the job.

With the lack of quality control, IWTV brings dozens of live streams to a wrestling audience every month, but AEW brings four or five shows every week to TV and YouTube. NXT is still on USA. SmackDown is on FOX, Raw is USA, all the shoulder programming, access to Peacock. Wrestling is very star driven and if AEW is able to successfully replicate a presentation to what fans want out of independent wrestling, they’re going to follow their favorite wrestlers. It’s my job to then figure out the next line of favorite wrestlers and put them in positions that fans are going to be able to connect with them.”

On evolving Beyond Wrestling’s product: “With all of this factored in, the Beyond Wrestling model as we knew it and cultivated for close to a decade, was ineffective largely, and that’s what led us to coming up with the idea of Wrestling Open. Even though I think the part of our show the fans interact with it is probably similar to what we accomplished with Uncharted Territory, the infrastructure and things that go on behind the scenes are drastically different and it’s just a matter of having that moment where we had to stop, reassess and figure out what all of the challenges were and try to come up with something that was going to check as many boxes and tackle as many issues as possible. Right now, it’s a situation where it’s the best of both worlds.

“It becomes challenging because with WWE and their wrestlers, we know we don’t have access to them. With AEW, it’s not like there is automatic access either. It simply comes back to the idea of managing fan expectation so we can put together the best possible card to make as many people happy as possible.”