Monday on Raw, Oba Femi put his guaranteed world title opportunity at SummerSlam on hold to instead settle his feud with Brock Lesnar inside Hell in a Cell.
I’m not going to critique the booking so much as I’m going to call WWE out for breaking one of its biggest advertised promises. Part of the selling point of last Saturday’s Night of Champions was to see who would become King and Queen of the Ring and move on to SummerSlam for a world title match.
Iyo Sky defeated Liv Morgan to become Queen, and
will now face Morgan for the Women’s World Championship at WWE’s big summer show in August, as advertised.
But fans who tuned into Night of Champions expecting the King of the Ring winner to earn a SummerSlam world title match got shortchanged. If WWE abandons that stipulation, and it appears it will, then it completely undermines one of the event’s central selling points.
This about-face is no different than WWE promising fans that the winner of the Royal Rumble would wrestle for the world title in the main event of WrestleMania. While winners like Shawn Michaels, The Undertaker, and Randy Orton competed for a world title, they did so earlier in the show rather than closing WrestleMania.
The good news is that WWE still has time to honor its advertised stipulation by having Femi pull double duty at SummerSlam. If it doesn’t, WWE isn’t likely to go out of its way to make it up to fans. It never did before when breaking its Rumble promise, so why would this be any different?
Card subject to change.
That phrase used to mean something. It protected promoters from being unable to deliver what was advertised in the event of an injury, illness, another unforeseen event, or a sudden departure from the promotion by one of its stars.
Today, it’s a crutch the company leans on when it’s no longer convenient to deliver what it promised to fans.
