How the indies feed WWE and AEW

WWE and AEW between them employ a few hundred wrestlers. They do not train most of them from nothing. A national company wants performers who already know how to work a match, hold a crowd for fifteen minutes and take a fall without injury — and the only place to learn those things in front of paying customers is the independent circuit. The indies absorb the cost and risk of the first five years of a career. The majors buy the finished article.

That arrangement is informal. No indie promotion has a contractual affiliation with WWE or AEW the way a Triple-A ballclub has with a big-league franchise. Scouts simply attend the larger independent shows, watch the tape that circulates online, and make offers. The wrestler who impresses is invited to a tryout, or signed outright to a developmental deal — WWE’s Performance Center and NXT brand since 2013, and before that its contracted training territories in Louisville and Tampa.

The indies are a minor league with no parent club, and the arrangement suits both sides.

The usual answer is a body of work in a promotion that scouts already watch. Three American independents built that reputation between the late 1990s and the 2010s, each for a different reason, and their alumni lists read like a roster of the national companies.

• A run of good matches on a promotion whose shows are filmed and distributed — the tape does the travelling.
• A character that already draws a reaction; the majors would rather sharpen a gimmick than invent one.
• Durability and a clean record. Scouts ask around about who is easy to work with and who is not.
• A distinctive look or size. It is not fair, and it is not new.
• Time. Most signees have five to ten years on the circuit behind them.

Ring of Honor opened in Philadelphia on 23 February 2002, founded by Rob Feinstein of the tape distributor RF Video in the vacuum left when ECW closed. It sold itself on the “Code of Honor” — handshakes before and after, no interference, respect for officials — a deliberate borrowing from Japanese wrestling that set it apart from the brawling of its ECW inheritance. Ownership passed to Cary Silkin in 2004, to Sinclair Broadcast Group in May 2011, and to AEW’s Tony Khan in 2022.

Its early roster is the clearest case study in the pipeline. Bryan Danielson, CM Punk and Samoa Joe were ROH main-eventers before WWE signed them; Danielson became Daniel Bryan, and both he and Punk headlined WrestleMania. Tyler Black became Seth Rollins. Kevin Steen became Kevin Owens, El Generico became Sami Zayn, Claudio Castagnoli became Cesaro. Adam Cole went from ROH to NXT and then AEW. Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks left ROH for New Japan and then co-founded AEW in 2019. The names changed at the border; the wrestlers did not.

Pro Wrestling Guerrilla was founded in 2003 by six Southern California wrestlers — Disco Machine, Excalibur, Scott Lost, Joey Ryan, Super Dragon and Top Gun Talwar — and ran its first show on 26 July that year. It never had a television deal and never wanted one. It ran a handful of shows a year in small rooms, most famously an American Legion post in Reseda, and sold the DVDs. Its annual Battle of Los Angeles tournament became the independent event that visiting wrestlers most wanted to be booked on.

Because PWG paid in exposure rather than money and booked whoever was best regardless of allegiance, it became the place where the scouts and the hardcore audience converged. Steen, Generico, Cole, Omega, the Young Bucks, Ricochet and Zack Sabre Jr. all worked its ring before national contracts. Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer called it the best wrestling in North America in 2016. Super Dragon put the promotion on indefinite hiatus in August 2023, citing personal circumstances.

Combat Zone Wrestling took the opposite approach. Founded by John Zandig in New Jersey in 1999, it inherited ECW’s hardcore audience and pushed further, into light tubes, barbed wire and thumbtacks; its Tournament of Death has run annually since 2002. Wrestler D.J. Hyde bought the company in 2009 and broadened the card beyond the deathmatch style, but the reputation stuck.

It is easy to assume that a deathmatch promotion produces only deathmatch wrestlers. The record says otherwise. Jon Moxley held the CZW World Heavyweight Championship before WWE signed him and renamed him Dean Ambrose; he later returned to the Moxley name as an AEW world champion. Adam Cole, Chris Hero, Drew Gulak and Sami Callihan all passed through. The CZW Wrestling Academy, opened in 1998, trained the promotion’s first generation. What the majors took from CZW was not the glass; it was performers who had learned to hold a room under pressure.

The pipeline does not only run upward. Wrestlers released from national contracts go back to the indies, sometimes for good and sometimes as a staging post. Cody Rhodes left WWE in 2016, spent two years on the independent circuit and in New Japan, co-promoted the 11,263-seat All In show in 2018, and helped found AEW on the strength of it. Ken Anderson, the subject of one of this archive’s profiles, came up through the Wisconsin independents, worked WWE and TNA for eleven years, and went back to the small halls and opened a school.

AEW’s arrival in 2019 changed the market by adding a second national buyer. It signed heavily and directly from the indies — Darby Allin and Orange Cassidy among the early names — and its 2022 purchase of Ring of Honor gave it, for the first time, something close to a formal developmental territory. Whether that becomes a true farm system or another rung on the same informal ladder is a question the next decade will answer.

The circuit trains them, the majors sign them, and the majors send some of them back. That loop is the business.