83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff - Strictly Business with Eric Bischoff #19: AEW house shows, WWE NXT Europe, and Goldberg

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

He's back, and he's better than ever! Eric Bischoff returns to "Strictly Business" this week, and he's fired up! Join Eric and Jon Alba as they discuss AEW's announcing expanded house shows, WWE moving forward with NXT Europe, and Bill Goldberg's legacy now that he's a free agent! Special thanks to this week's sponsor! Empiraa- Sign up now and receive free onboarding, your first 14 days for free, and 24/7 support. Get ahead of the game and save 20% on your subscription by using the code 'wrestlebiz' at checkout. Launch your business plan faster and with less effort than ever before. Visit www.empiraa.com/eric today and start your journey to success!  FOLLOW ALL OF OUR SOCIAL MEDIA at https://83weekslinks.com/ Stop throwing your money on rent! Get into a house with NO MONEY DOWN and roughly the same monthly payment at SaveWithConrad.com Get early, ad-free access to more than a dozen of your favorite wrestling podcasts, starting at just $9 over on AdFreeShows.com. That's less than 15 cents an episode each month! You can also listen to them directly through Apple Podcasts or your other regular podcast apps! AdFreeShows.com also has thousands of hours worth of bonus content including popular series like Title Chase, Eric Fires Back, Conversations with Conrad, Mike Chioda's Mailbag and many more! Plus, live, interactive virtual chats with your favorite podcasts hosts and wrestling legends. All that and much more! Sign up today at AdFreeShows.com! If your business targets 25-54 year old men, there's no better place to advertise than right here with us on Strictly Business. You've heard us do ads for some of the same companies for years...why? Because it works! And with our super targeted audience, there's very little waste. Go to AdvertiseWithEric.com now and find out more about advertising with Strictly Business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

NMLS number 65084 Equal Healthy Lended. Woo! As an adult, don't we all miss spring break? Nothing like taking a week off from all your responsibilities. Well, here's the next best thing for adults. A spring break from house payments. SavewithConrad.com can help you get rid of all your credit card debt, just like that. We're routinely helping our listeners, say, 5, 6, 7, even $800 a month.

And you don't need perfect credit or money out of your pocket to do this, but check this out. No house payments for two months. It's savewithconrad.com. what's going on everyone it's time for another edition of strictly business with eric bischoff presented to you by the podcast heat network ad free shows and of course our good pals at impira who you'll be hearing about in just a little bit here on strictly business now last week it was myself john alba and chris van bleat bringing you an awesome awesome episode on wrestling content

creation but felt like i was missing my tag team partner so without further ado let's bring back the man of the hour himself ladies and gentlemen mr eric bischoff easy e look at that smile look at those dimples oh you're looking good my friend good to have you back how are you man good to be back i was missing you man i'm glad that we're back in the back of a cadillac here uh i don't get me wrong love chris van bleat he did say that he was the more he was the less talented but better looking version of you so i don't know i'd give i'd give i'd give you i'd give a to him on both sides of that equation man he's pretty smart he's a very gifted talent he's really good at what he does and he does have pretty awesome here he does have great

hair he's got a great podcast insight with chris van bleat go check that out if you haven't already we did an entire episode on wrestling content creation i got so many tweets about this episode we love strictly business when we live to in line do we not eric that is exactly what we're that is our destiny we were born to do this podcast to enlighten the professional wrestling audience so that they may enjoy the product they love even more knowledge is power knowledge is pleasure trust me how you doing my friend everything going all right for you these days perfect couldn't be better love to hear that love to hear that we've got a great little rapid fire episode of strictly business for you all if you are an ad free shows dot

com subscriber you are watching this live and we'd love to hear from you in the chat if you have any questions about the business of the business for eric bischoff well then you have come to the right place like josh clemens who says ready to soak up some knowledge let's do it let's do it why don't we eric uh this is going to be one of those episodes where eric and i go through a few different topics in particular we talk about what's been hot in the industry right now and uh one thing that i would love to pick your brain on eric is we are now seeing AEW hit the road with these house rules, house shows. They did their first one in Ohio this past week.

It was a packed house. The wrestlers were all tweeting about how much they loved it. And then we got the announcement that they're going to be doing a Canadian tour headlined by the forbidden door pay-per-view event with New Japan that they pretty much sold out in a matter of minutes. House shows in AEW. Eric, it's not something we've seen a whole lot of. Jeff Jarrett's back in the equation there directing live events. what do you make of the decision to start to go a little all in on these house shows for

i think it's great i think it is there is absolutely nothing but positive upside potentially business wise we're going to find out but i think in the certainly in the near term even into the midterm midterm meeting over the next 12 months i think it'll probably be i think it'll be a very successful effort. You know, AEW has proven that despite what I consider to be soft and flat ratings, meaning not growing, despite that, their big live events, their pay-per-views, do really, really well. Now, the real test is going to come if this tour is successful and it continues beyond the first

six months or the first whatever. I don't know what the time frame is. It's when you start coming back to markets, it's you really begin to see how viable your live event business is. You can expect the audience is going to come out and experience it for the first time. It's, you know, AEW still has that new car smell for a lot of markets and as far as a live event. You won't know how successful your live event strategy is until you start showing up in those markets a second in a third time. That's a year, year and a half, two years down the road. So I think in the midterm, I think it's going to be very successful.

I love it for the talent's sake. I just don't think, and I can't speak as a professional wrestler, right? But I've certainly been around them long enough and have heard a consistent theme amongst all of them that if you're not working constantly, if you're not, you know, getting reps throughout the week, it's a lot easier to get injured. it's a lot harder to come up with fresh stuff. It's a lot harder to stay crisp and keep your timing where you want it so that when you are on TV, you're a fine-tuned machine. And I think having a live event schedule is going to help all of those things,

as well as some creative, because that's where the ideas come from. When you're not under pressure, when you don't have TV cameras on you, when you're not following so much of it, well, not so much in AEW's case because I don't think there's a real strong storyline. in anything anywhere or format to their stories but it's an opportunity to try some ideas and come up

with some new stuff so i i think it's all positive i encourage you as we tape this on thursday to go check out last night's episode of dynamite because it was a pretty different show structure than what i feel like maybe you become a little accustomed to with dynamite where there was an a story threaded throughout the entire episode of dynamite and so somebody's so somebody over there's listening to a to strictly business i I mean, I'm not saying they are, but I'm not saying they're not. Just saying that's what this shows for. We live to enlighten, even those that think they know everything.

This AEW House World's Tour, again, they're doing shows in the U.S. right now, but the big announcement came last week through Canada, specifically starting with June 28th, where they go up to Hamilton, Ontario, and then they will run through Edmonton, Saskatchewan. Then they will head over. They're doing a, I know this is something fun for you. They're actually doing at the Saddle Dome, they're doing an event with Calgary Stampede, which is going to be a fun little tie-in, obviously, a lot of wrestling history there.

And then on June 25th, we will see the forbidden door pay-per-view. Give me a little perspective here, Eric, on Canada as a wrestling market, whether it's drawing back from WCW or any other endeavors that you've had. How thirsty are they for this content? You know, I had limited experience. producing television or promoting live events in Canada. WCW didn't really make much of an effort, a real effort in the Canadian market until Nitro got real hot. And even then it was very limited because it was so expensive for us to go over to Canada.

It was a very unique situation in Canada when it came to television, not so much with live events. But it was never a focus for WCW. So my experience is somewhat limited. I can't really comment too much on it in terms of doing business over there and in terms of working with buildings and local promoters and local advertisers, things like that. I can tell you from having been a talent in WWE and certainly to a degree in WCW that the Canadian audience loves the product. I don't know. I mean, UK is hot as hell.

You know, every time I go over there, it just seems to be such a passive. in a crowd, I feel the same way about Canada. The appetite for professional wrestling is consistent, you know, across the board, in markets across the country, consistently higher than it is here in the States. We've got some really hot markets, some not so hot markets. Canada seems to be hot from coast to coast. I also think it's something that is the perfect market

for an experiment here with these house shows because AW hasn't serviced that Canadian market yet. This is AW's first real run up through Canada. They've had very few shows in Canada to this point. And so when you're a newer product, I know they've been around for four years now, but there's still a newer product, getting that out in front of these fans' eyes in person. For the first time, you're probably leveraging yourself for some success in moving tickets there since it's the first time through. Would that make sense in theory? I don't know what you mean by leveraging. I think it's a hands down safe bet that the first time or two you come through a market with a new product and a new company. And let's keep in mind, you know, there's, you know, you got Chris Jericho

front and center. He's, you know, maybe not the hood ornament for AEW, but he's definitely a big shiny bumper, if nothing else. You got some legacy there and some talent there. You know, you still got Christian part of the AEW roster. I don't know who else from Canada's there. Kenny Omega. Kenny Omega. So look, they're going to do great. They are going to do great the first time, maybe even the second time through a year from now.

Let's see what happens after that. Hopefully they'll continue to build, but I expect that this is good, like I said earlier, I don't think there's any risk, but honestly. And they also, by the way, Eric announced that at one of those loops, one of those weekends, they're going to be taping television on a. Saturday night. There was no name for the TV taping or anything, but it was a Saturday night

TV taping that is advertised. And I don't know. When I saw that, it just piqued my interest a little bit based on what we were discussing a few weeks ago here on Strictly Business about AW potentially adding another hour of television on a weekend specifically. Good for them. I think it's stupid. I think it's a dumb move. The product is soft on television as it is. The core product is inconsistent and that's being really, really kind, really kind in terms of creative. Having another hour of television and less, you know, and maybe it's just an economic opportunity that is too hard to say no to, and I understand that. But I am so unexcited about another hour of AEW until I see a couple hours of it that I find compelling. And I haven't seen that

in a long time. Let me ask you this, and this is me genuinely asking for perspective here, because I feel like you probably have some idea of logistics with this, if they were to do another TV taping out there and pair that up with a house show, for example, so say maybe you're taping Saturday TV and then doing a house show on Sunday, would that logistically make more sense than doing, say, a one-off taping from a cost perspective? because I have no real perspective on how much a TV taping cost to run versus how much a house show costs to run.

Again, I, you know, I don't know what today's costs are, but I'm going to guess and I'm going to be fairly accurate based on costs 10 years ago. I'm guessing that AEW's Wednesday night show runs 400,000, $250,000. I don't know if that probably doesn't agree. You know, it depends how you account for talent, but just production costs, travel for talent, production costs, satellite uplinks,

everything that goes into it, I would be surprised if it costs them, excuse me, cost them AW less than 450 gram. That's $225,000 an hour. That's still very, very inexpensive. cable television, and particularly for the numbers that it delivers. In order to do a television taping on a Saturday night and then a live show on the Sunday night would require

that you're probably going to be at least 150 miles away, 100 miles away. Or are you anticipating going into a market, shooting, on Saturday night and doing a live show in the same market on Sunday because that will be a mistake. That won't work in a long run. Running two nights back to back, one TV show, one house show, I think would be a real challenge as a business model. And not that's being reported. That's just me asking hypothetically. No, no, no, no. And there's two ways of doing it. One is to try to, you know, look, in an ideal world, if you were so hot that you could do a Saturday night show in a Sunday afternoon show, for example, or Sunday night in the same market.

So you're flying your talent, all the one location, you don't have to rent cars to get you to another location, you don't have to shoot TV, have your production crew, tear everything down, you know, ship the ring and another crew off to do a live, like that's a lot of logistics and a lot of expense if you're going to do back-to-back markets. But if you can do them both, if you're so hot, you can do essentially set up once, do a TV one night, live event the next day. The economies of scale make all kinds of sense, but you won't be able to sustain that model very long. It's too much. It's just too much.

As much as you love Bruce Springsteen, if he came to your local venue three times a month, even you would probably get tired of it after a while. I'm not going to answer that one. I'm not going to reveal publicly how many shows on this tour I'm going to, Eric, but that's okay. I don't do anything for myself except for live music. So you get it. Live music is the best.

Nothing tops live music. Pro wrestling's pretty good, too. But I'm a little all in on that. We got a great question here from Brian from ad-free shows. It says, would AW be better off taking one of their YouTube shows and putting it on TV? They already tape it. Why not just use that? Because I don't think it meets broadcast standards.

now you're talking about shooting a show that costs X because it's a YouTube show and to make it a television show and made broadcast standards, it's probably going to cost X plus. That's one reason. And again, why oversaturate a product that isn't doing that well on television anyway? I mean, this is so illogical. It's great internet wrestling things. thinking. Why not just stream it?

Why not just building up, build up the power of your streaming platform, since linear television, cable television is a slowly dying thing anyway. Why put resources into a dying entity, dilute the product that you already have that isn't really doing that well on television anyway, despite how much you contort yourself into believing that it is, right? Put your resources into the next step. evolution of the product not to another hour or two and more have more ring of honor and more cross promotion and more forbidden door everything you do continues to dilute your core product but couldn't you argue that that's a Warner brother discovery move I don't know if it is they don't know what the hell they're doing well because I was just saying like you said well why not put it on a streaming platform versus on TV well Warner Brothers Discovery owns the Turner networks and

they also own HBO Macs. So couldn't they have discretion over where that would air in theory? Well, they certainly would have a voice. Right. You know, I think a typical scenario might be for Tony Kahn to have an idea and propose it to the network and the network to, obviously it's the network's choice, whether they move forward or not Tony's choice. Tony can propose it. Or perhaps, as you're putting it out, you know, Mortar Brothers Discovery is coming to Tony and saying, hey, this is what we want. That could very well be the case.

And if that's the case, more power to Tony. I would do the same thing he's doing if that's the case. But look, I've, I've been there. I launched a second tier product. I launched a prime time, but still second tier product, when Nitro was the hottest thing in cable television, original content, weekly, right? And we launched Thunder.

Not because we wanted to, because we were mandated. to. And I saw what happened. WWE has experienced the same thing. It's taken them a long time to figure out how not to dilute Rob and Smackdown and Smackdown and Raw with their two primetime television shows. And that's with a 40-some-odd-year brand behind you and, you know, decades of huge television success and prime time behind you and momentum and generations of fans behind them. and they still struggled and AEW isn't even close to having a solid television show yet beyond the you know the audience that currently loves them but it's a small audience

I don't know I just think it's that none of it makes sense to me but you know I'm out of the loop so maybe there's a strategy there that makes sense to somebody that matters because nobody's going to give a damn what I say anywhere right well coach Rosie who's an ad for show subscriber he certainly gives a damn what you've got to say he also just celebrated his birthday happy belated birthday my friend question he says on average what percentage profit does a major wrestling company make off of a house show well average you know there's no you always shoot for we shot for after always said and done if you come in with an 18 percent ebada that's earnings before all interest, depreciate, all the cost, taxes, everything.

If you've got a margin of 18 to 20 percent on any segment of your business unit, whether it's house shows or pay-per-view or merchandise or licensing, that's a good number. That's a really good number. That was the target. And it just depends how hot you are. And it depends on what your strategy is. You know, for a long time in WCW, we weren't making any money. We didn't really start making money in WCW and the house show business until probably 95.

When Night Show got hot. Then it started turning around. Up until that point, we were lucky if we were breaking even and making 5 or 10 percent. Maybe. Or throughout, if you average the course of a year, maybe five or 10 percent prior to 95, yeah, maybe in 94 we were there. Prior to that, we were losing money hand over fist in a live event business. It's very expensive, very expensive, a lot of variables. I can only imagine now what travel costs, what they are. That's good. You know, travel costs used to be

a big line item, expense line item when you were touring, but with the cost of rent of cars now, airline tickets now those margins are going to be tough and I'm sure the prices are going to reflect that but I still think it's going to do well I think the first year and a half it's going to do well and on top of that too the business has changed so much in terms of pay scale where back in the day the talent and I'm at least speaking from the WWE perspective you know you had your downside guarantee and then the percentage of the gates was a really important part of how talent made money in the first place. And I'm not sure how that had a direct correlation with what the office brought home with each house show. But that has changed significantly where

LiveGate is no longer, especially in WWE's case, no longer the major barometer for how talent get paid. Now we have these massive television contracts. We have the deals with Saudi Arabia, all these different elements come together. And you're seeing talent get much higher salaries, guaranteed salaries, and you're seeing less than LiveGate be important to how they get paid. Did what talent would get paid and that cut, did that affect what you guys would walk away with as a company? In WCW?

WCW specifically, yeah. We didn't pay talent based on, there was no rev share. It was no red share. Absolutely no. It was basically set up the same way AEW was, to my understanding, AWCW is guaranteed contracts. There's no rev share in AEW. I doubt that there's any revenue quite yet to share. You look at, they're getting $45 million from Turner.

What do you think the talent budget is in the AEW right now? What would your guess be? Well, I know this. You have the first tier contracts, which pay around $75,000, and some go a little higher than that too. And that's for like the lowest level guarantees. And then you go.

So how many, so that's interesting. kind of, but there's another, you know, there's a, there's another value in that component, which is how many of those $75,000 people are out there? Yeah. I'm not entirely sure. One thing that that did become relevant to the discourse this past week, I'm not sure if you saw this or not. But there was a conversation about how AW, and this is true, AW pays for all travel and lodging for all of its employees that go to TV, including talent.

make-up production coaches producers whomever they pay for everything whereas wwe it's still is you're you're paying for your rent a cars you're paying for your hotels uh air fares is sometimes covered but yeah and that became a pretty big conversation in the wrestling discourse this week and i'm curious how that affects budgets too because that can't be a cheap expense it's not it's not and you know when i say i hear here here Here's my version, my perspective on what AEW success will be with their touring. I think they will sell out or nearly sell out almost everywhere they go. That doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be profitable.

Because we don't know what the costs are. We don't know what the salaries are. See, there's so much we don't know. We know what clearly AEW wants us to know. you know, Tony's very free to tell us how much an event grosses. We get a million dollars in ticket sales, which is a cause for celebration. It's a great threshold. But we don't know what kind of a profit margin is there, do we?

Because if you look at AEW, where are they making their money? Television content licensing is number one at 45 million a year. How many paper views do they do a year? Five. four or five five okay i don't know what the math is but you could do the math and figure what figure out you know what that revenue is um i don't know that they've got any significant licensing right now perhaps they do and i don't know but you add the you estimate those things and then you have to start adding up what their costs are you get 45 million dollars a year to produce a television

show that probably costs them two million dollars a month or more in just physical hard physical production costs well there's half of your 45 million goes or more goes just into physical production plus your travel plus your talent you just don't know what the margins are but i do think as far as gross sales i'll be shocked if they don't sell out or come close like I said, just about everywhere they go. Jeff Jarrett knows what he's doing, certainly. And the market is hot for AEW as a live event. It still has that new car smell in 90% of the country.

I was actually going to ask you about that, about Jeff Jared specifically, obviously somebody you know pretty well, but also given his experience in the industry with multiple companies plus everything that he learned growing up, the son of a promoter, a very successful promoter. What does he bring to a position like that

in terms of mapping out AW's road forward on live events? Decades of experience. You know, one of the great things about having a guy like Jeff there is he's experienced it. He's experienced the live event business when it was in the absolute toilet and they had to dig in every way possible to find a way to make a nickel.

He's experienced the live event business when it was at its peak of its success and knows what works and how to make that work. He knows how to route tours. He knows which markets are hot, which markets are lukewarm, which markets can be a little touch and go, and current experience,

because he was doing this in WWE, when I was in WWE back in 2019. So it's not like Jeff's been out of the live event loop. He's been in that loop recently at the very highest of levels and knows it. He's done it himself. And one of the great things about a guy like Jeff is he's made a lot of mistakes and he's had a lot of great success. And you take from both.

That's where experience comes in. You don't just come to the table with nothing but successful experience. That certainly has value. But a guy like Jeff who's been through the ups, the downs, good, the bank. you know and survive through it all also knows what not to do and knowing what not to do could be way more valuable than what you should do i am in 100% agreement with you on that my friend and listen like failure is part of life right like you try to set yourself up for success and sometimes you don't but the way that we set ourselves up for success here on strictly business is with

our pals over at Impera. These guys are the best. And I'm not just saying that because they're a proud partner of Strictly Business, but they have been so genuinely invested in helping us here at Strictly Business, Eric, because they want to get their message out about how they can help you focus on setting up a business plan that will make sure that everyone in your company or for your product is held accountable. Let's talk about Imper, man. I mean, these guys, they're everywhere. They're, these days. They just opened up an office in Denver. They were just telling us about this a few weeks ago when we were setting up our account with Empira because they want to help people across the globe get business plans for the future by turning ideas into actionable plans. What's

something you want to inform the audience about here with Imper, Eric? Well, look, I want to be clear. You know, when I talk about a business plan, a business plan is something you generally do before you launch a business, right? You, and really what a really good business plan does, in my experience, and I've worked with some people who are nothing, that's all they do. They're financial people who do nothing more than build very sophisticated business plans. But that's what you do before you launch a business. What do you do after you've launched your business?

You have to have a tool that allows you to, execute on that business plan. And those tools have to be able to allow you to track on a daily basis, in a real-time basis, and communicate where you're at within the segments of that business plan in order to be successful. I've seen absolutely stunning business plans that I was so impressed with. and you learn so much because it forces you to think about the details of your business that you might not otherwise think of why you're excited about building your business.

It forces you to get down into the trenches and tackle the tough stuff, things that you don't really want to tackle. And it forces you to think those things through. But once you have that plan, you need a tool that keeps you on track. And that's what Empura does. otherwise it's a little bit if you don't have a good business plan and you don't have a tool like impura it's like it's like building the airplane while you're trying to fly it that's the best way i can say it you don't want to do that you want to have a good business plan but you have to have a tool that

helps you execute it and impera not only gives you an intuitive easy to structure completely customizable for your business, whatever that is, whether it's just you working out of your home with a side hustle, or you and two or three are your friends doing it, or maybe you're a family-owned business, it doesn't matter. Or if you've got 200 employees, it's customizable for your business. It'll keep you on track. It'll keep everybody accountable, it'll allow you to execute on a great business. Organization and accountability are massive when it comes to running a successful business. You need to have a vision statement.

You need to have core values. You need to set pillars because pillars, as we know, Eric, those are the foundations of every good plan, whether it's in professional wrestling or in the business world. And with Imperial, you can set up teams. You can assign team members. So all of your employees, no matter how many you have, you can assign them to specific teams

and set objectives for them. So you're ensuring that you as a business owner get to work on the business. business and not in the business. And we here at Strictly Business want to help you out with 14 days free from Impera, 20% off your subscription, go to impura.com, E-M-P-I-A-A-A-A-com forward slash Eric, and use code wrestle biz, W-R-E-S-T-L-E-B-I-Z. And you're saying, man, that's a great discount. But the beauty is, Eric, even with just the discount, we're talking about an operation that costs you less than two cups a coffee. a month to you think about how many times you go to get a cup of coffee a day this coffee a day a day an hour

hot half a pot a day easy right but kidding aside look and if no matter how big or small check out a they'll do an onboarding with you they will so even if you're you know a technically challenged individual as myself a live human being will be on the other line and and we'll walk you through it and show you how to customize this unique tool, unique tool that'll help make you successful. And I'll do it for you over the phone. It's easy. Yes, big time shout out to Dean and to Ash,

who have been helping us out over at Strictly Business, get set up with the platform. They're there to help you as well. Empira.com, E-M-P-I-A-A-A-com forward slash Eric, use that code, wrestle biz for 14 days free and 20% off your subscription. We thank them for sponsoring, strictly business Eric I want to

discuss with you another element of touring and it's more so based on expansion and that's what WWE has going on with NXT now if you remember years ago all of that kind of set the ground for

them to expand into Japan and into Europe and they were looking at maybe Germany WXW is a very popular promotion right now in Germany and we did here last year that nxte europe was going to be the plan this past week sean michael said in an interview that they're hoping to get that launched by the end of 2023 and they envision that it will look something similar to what we see with the current american nxte product what do you think

the merit is in having an nxte property in europe specifically they tried with nxte u k it seems like they want to expand beyond just one specific territory. And how do you think that sets WWE up for success internationally? In a massive way on a couple different levels. Number one, you're going to find great talent, right? And having essentially local franchises, these are WWE wholly owned subsidiaries, NXT. Now you're having a subsidiary of a subsidiary, I guess, over internationally.

But essentially what you're having is a WWE local presence in key markets where professional wrestling is hot. It will help support the television product in the local market. It'll help discover and build and develop talent in the local market, all of which will eventually become essentially a feeding tube for the larger corporate structure or core product in WWE. That's where that talent will, the cream of the crop, as we've seen, we'll travel through those local markets, NXT Europe markets, and make their way eventually to the RAR or Smackdown. I would imagine, that's the goal.

That's how you develop talent. And if you think about it, it's a little bit like, it's a little bit like the old territory system except for one guy kind of owns the whole territory, but you're developing talent in those local markets. I think it's a great strategy. The only pushback I have on it, and this was something that we kind of saw with NXT UK, and it was pretty controversial among a lot of the independents out there,

was that WWE was signing these talent to low money, but exclusive contracts. So the independent scene in the UK, in particular, which is very very rich with talent was losing a lot of talent to the nxtu k brand because there was the promise of potentially going over and working for raw smackdown and we saw a lot of indies out there in the UK go under because of that it almost seems like that is empirical in a way where you're coming in and driving out all of these other for lack of better term here uncompetitive

entities in these independent markets. They're not going to be competing with the WWE machine. That seems to me like that can be dangerous for the health of the industry. Isn't that exactly what happened here in the United States? And was it healthy?

For the business, obviously it was. Look at the size of the impact of the business today versus what it was back then. It's hard to argue. Professional wrestling industry today is bigger than anybody had ever imagined it ever could be at any point in time in terms of its financial impact and its distribution around the world of course it's been great for the business unfortunately it's

only been great for one guy in the business but you know it's why i made the the analysis of the comparison i think to the old territory system here in the united states now we're seeing a version of that taking place over in Europe and the strong independence will survive and the weaker or the marginal ones won't or over a period of time a lot of talent who will cite on to those low money contracts in Europe hoping to get a shot once they realize that that shot is years if ever away and they'll migrate back into the Indy scene it's just the natural evolution of business Circle of life. The circle of life, if you were, Richie Reyes says, and the internet is a major factor these days, whereas it wasn't obviously back in the territory days.

And reach is certainly something that's important. Like, I'm curious, we don't know this answer yet. Where will NXT Europe be watchable? You know, the WWE network doesn't exist anymore in the United States. It exists internationally. Would this be a problem? Well, they're not. They certainly exist in other countries.

There are more people that watch WWE in India than there are in the United States. So clearly the WWE has an international footprint outside of the streaming platform. What that looks like, I don't know. I don't know what their international distribution. Well, that's what I'm saying. We don't know if this would be on streaming platform. We don't know if this would be picked up locally with their existing television deals over internationally. And is it something that you're actually marketing to a United States audience?

because NXT, UK, they tried to market to the U.S. audience and didn't work. And that's why it folded at the end of the day because there wasn't anything catching. Now, this is something that you would uniquely put together just for this individual platform for this specific audience. Like, I don't know if NXT Japan is specifically, or if a Japanese wrestling audience, I should say, is specifically going to be all that interested in NXT Europe, for example. It's going to be very interesting to see how they decide to market that stuff. But they did mention, too, Eric, and I'd love to hear thoughts on this, because you and I, way back when we launched this podcast, did a great episode with A.J. Francis now, top dollar in WWE, about utilizing these NIL programs where they're going more into the collegiate athletics spectrum and trying to pluck athletes from there and put them on the track to become superstars. Sean Michaels did say that that's something internationally that they might look to explore.

Do you still see the merit in that versus the traditional independent route? I just don't know enough about it. That's a world that I never stepped foot into, really. It's a post-erick-Bischoff world when it comes to that side of the business. And there's so much, you know, so much has changed in Europe, it's really hard. It would be hard for me to comment on that, to be honest. what do you think of the concept of it in general though leaning into collegiate athletes versus those who are on the one track path through the independence again i don't know john i wish i don't know enough about the nil business and i don't like to try to pretend i know something i don't you know that's a that's a part of the business that i really don't know much about does it fascinate you um like anything that's new in the industry it interests me i don't know that i'm fascinated yet

it's too early for me to be fascinated i'd like to learn a little bit more and see how it's working and how it's growing but i'm not interested enough in it yet to do any digging i haven't googled the internet well i kind of bring that up because you know there's a guy who maybe back in the day had something like that been around, maybe his career path could have been totally different. And that, of course, is Bill Goldberg. And this was a big story this week, and it's something we'll wrap this episode of Strictly Business with Eric. Bill Goldberg is a free agent.

His contract with WWE has come to a close. Keep in mind, he was brought in in 2016 to do a one-off with Brock Lesner. And as we know, that turned into a much, much longer run of about six years where he was doing one or two matches every single year, won a couple different championships. throughout the course of that run, had some dream matches along the way. But now he finds himself back out there. And he even said he'd be open to having a proper retirement match. So let me ask you this, Eric, is a guy who's so keenly familiar with Bill Goldberg

and what he brought to the industry as a performer in both the modern day and the past. What do you feel he contributed in this last run? And was his return to the industry good for the industry? oh gosh i think that's in the eye of the beholder was it good for bill goldberg absolutely put a couple million bucks in his pocket got a chance to experience something with his son and his wife that was very important to him fans got to reconnect and it re-experienced bill goldberg again um some fans that were even too young to really experience bill goberg at his peak was able to experience Bill Goldberg, and everybody seemed to have a great time in the

process doing it, regardless of how great you thought his matches was. It was an exciting time. I think it was all good in many, many ways. How would, you know, I don't think you can, I don't know how to measure how it affected the industry. I would say probably not at all. Did it change the industry? Does Bill Goldberg's presence or anybody else's presence for that matter change the industry now not a long time but i certainly think it was it was good for the fans it was good for w we it was good for gulberg it was good for bill goldberg's family so how else would you judge its success i don't know well he was used in saudi arabia multiple times in in a main event role he won a championship in saudi arabia right before covid even happened um it's it is one

of those when hell freezes over kinds of things like i don't think anyone expected to see bill goldberg have one more run in w vwe let alone when he had the one match in 2016 everyone's like okay this is a one-off and then he goes on to wrestle for five more years yeah we've forgotten but you know bill is not very kind when after wcdb you had a lot of negative things to say about w you get a lot of negative things to say even after his first run in wwe and still ended up going back which you know that's the business it's the nature of the business and you kind of get used to that when you've been in the business for a long time timing timing is everything and sometimes it creates situations where people make comebacks and have a huge amount of success

that nobody thought they would and bill was certainly in that category i'm happy for him um i think AEW would be a great place for Bill. You know, they'd hire them. They'd pay millions and millions and millions of dollars and they'd ask him to work once or twice a year and you end up in a witness protection program and it would be great. You'd hardly ever have to leave San Diego. Maybe he could work a deal into his contract where he only works TV when it's in San Diego. I was going to ask you about AEW and Bill Goldberg because that was something that came up

hot on. he's going to tease it like he's going to have a big surprise of course why not get some mileage out of that i would be shocked i mean honestly i doubt bill needs the money i'm pretty sure that's a safe bet um man that that that rush doesn't get any better than the rush he's had in wwee it just doesn't get any better than that now financially he could probably possibly, I guess, make a really, really sweet deal. And hey, business is business. Bill's all about business.

Don't think he's not. But unless he's really money-motivated, I don't see it happening. Because it is a step down. I know people are going to hate me for the idea. You're burying a.W. Piss off. Just piss off.

It's my freaking opinion. If you don't like it, keep listening i was going to say all right don't don't tell them to go anywhere else but yeah i mean look one thing that tony con has earned the benefit of the doubt with he treats legends very well legends get great treatment in a w from a television perspective i mean look at this right they're paid a shit ton of money and don't have to work no but but it's be any better than there. But look how Sting is positioned, for example. Sting is positioned. I'm just having fun. I agree. Sting is positioned in a fantastic role right now, where, by the way, Sting just

celebrated his birthday and he's still kicking ass, which is just awesome. But he's positioned in a great role. He just wrestled on dynamite. And he and Orange Cassidy did business together. And it was great. And this guy gets to go in there and he's chasing that one last ride. He's gone on the record about that. Honestly, I think if Tony did bring Goldberg in for a one-off or something. There's obviously a lot of tie-ins you can do in with the history of Turner and Bill Goldberg. And a guy like Wardlow could benefit significantly from working with a Bill Goldberg and getting that rub from something. And here's the other side of that optimistic coin. Guess what's going to happen to morale when a guy like Bill Goldberg comes strutting in with a

five or $7 million a year contract. Guess what happens to everybody else that's been in the witness protection program for the last year and a half that can't get a phone call returned or an email responded to they're just sitting at home they're getting a check and then they come they get up in the morning and they read that bill goldberg's coming to ae w obviously that we don't know that that's going to happen but if that were to happen yes there's a lot of opportunity but there are some unintended consequences that come along as well it's just part of it I was going to say, but that's wrestling too. Like when WWE brings back John Cena for WrestleMania.

Absolutely. Someone gets bumped off the card. Absolutely. Absolutely. The difference is that's been happening a lot with AEW. A lot of WWE talent that's come in over the last year and a half for two years. And we haven't seen a lot of them. I don't know.

I just. I don't see. I don't see it happening. I just don't, but I could be wrong. I don't either. I'm often wrong. I admit it I'm wrong.

I have no problem admitting I'm wrong when I'm wrong. Well, we love covering. But I'm right a lot too. So we'll see. You are right a lot. You are right a lot. People every single week,

whether I'm at an indie show or people who say, do you know how lucky you get to do a show with Eric Bischoff every week? I said, I am very lucky that I get to do strictly business with Eric Bischoff. Because I learn from Eric Bischoff every week, and we hope you do as well. 83 weeks.com make sure you're subscribed and also make sure that you're subscribed over at adfree shows.com because those who are subscribed to adfreeshows.com are actually getting access to this

nice and early because they are getting a chance to tune in live. So make sure that you are doing that as well and you get access to all the great Conrad Thompson podcast. There are so many out there the conrad cinematic universe is bigger than it's and uh you know what knowing conrad chances are it's probably going to keep expanding at the end of the day so yeah that man does not slow down he is he is he is a force of gravity he is becoming his own planetary and solar system we all revolving he's not going on man i'm just happy to be in that little orbit spinning around with them. Absolutely. Again, guys, check out Empira, 14 days free, 20% off your subscription. Impira.com forward slash Eric Code, wrestlebiz, cheaper than two cups of coffee a month as is. Get that

discount courtesy of Eric Bischoff. You're going to be in a good place with your business. Anything else you want to add here, Eric? Not a thing, brother. Great to be back. Probably see you this weekend or hear from you this weekend. And let's secure up for another great show next week. I've been a little busy been a little preoccupied this week so i haven't really been able to focus as much as i'd like to but next week i want to drill in hard and deep on where wwe is in their sale status and that will be the perfect lead into russomania week as well which is the busiest week of the year for wwee so that will be lots of fun he's eric bischoff i'm john abel we'll see you next time right here on strictly business with erd bischoff

Thank you.