R.I.P. AAA
In February 2025, El Hijo del Dr Wagner Jr signing with WWE seemed to be nothing short of a formality. Instead, he made the surprising decision to turn down their offer, and to sign with AAA.
The third generation luchadore’s stated reason was that, while WWE were interested, they had made it clear that he would be expected to remove his mask. Much is made about the significance of the mask in Lucha Libre, and for a wrestler whose mask has a lineage dating back to his late grandfather’s debut in the early 1960s, that significance is only more pronounced. But let’s be clear, this isn’t some mystical or even merely sentimental connection, it’s a calculated business decision - the mask of a Wagner family member has real tangible value, and EHDWJ (as nobody calls him) weighed up that value against the offer on the table from WWE and found the American promotion wanting. His father, Dr Wagner Jr, lost his mask to Psycho Clown in the main event of Triplemania 25 - Lucha Libre is so sidelined in the majority of conversations and online spaces about professional wrestling that you would be forgiven for not knowing that this match garnered a 22.8 rating, higher than the Floyd Mayweather/Conor McGregor fight on the same night, making it the most watched professional wrestling match in North America in the past 30 years - and El Hijo del Dr Wagner Jr is savvy enough to the wrestling business to recognise that there’s a big money match waiting in the wings, for the son to try and avenge his father’s loss. To give up on that payday and unmask merely because WWE creative requested it would be a profound mistake.
There were a few fans online I saw cast doubt on Wagner’s explanation, pointing to the likes of Rey Mysterio, Dragon Lee, and Penta, who have been permitted to keep their masks while wrestling in WWE. I believe there are a few dynamics at play here; one is that those three luchadores arrived in WWE with equity built up behind them on television for other companies - particularly in the case of Penta, and to a lesser case Dragon Lee, a significant part of the appeal in signing them is a perception game, the PR win of signing away a featured act from AEW, and in that case, allowing them to remain as close to their presentation in that promotion as possible is all part of the game. Another is the nature of the masks; Rey, Lee, Penta, and more recent signing Rey Fenix, have a cutaway design, with the mouth and lower jaw visible, and sizable eye holes, while El Hijo del Dr Wagner Jr’s mask covers much more of his face. A lot may have changed in WWE in recent years - though not as much as they would like us to believe - but they don’t seem to have shaken a core tenet of Vince McMahon’s approach to wrestling, which is that a wrestler reaches the audience principally through their facial expressions, and their eyes especially. It’s a mentality that places a ceiling on luchadores, and masked wrestlers in general, by assuming that audiences are unable to connect to a wrestler whose face is concealed, because they can’t read their emotions, see their pains and their triumphs etched on their face - it would come as some surprise to fans of the likes of El Santo, Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras, or indeed of Psycho Clown and Dr Wagner Jr., to hear that there was any difficulty connecting emotionally to their masked heroes, but such is the line of thought that has governed mainstream American wrestling for half a century. The third factor is, simply, that El Hijo del Wagner Jr is too big to be what WWE pigeon-holes a luchadore as - he is, by lucha standards, a heavyweight, who stands over six feet tall. To WWE, that disqualifies him from the box marked “luchadore”, and moves him over into the lucha-adjacent category occupied by the likes of Santos Escobar, Andrade, and Alberto Del Rio, made to unmask and reinvent themselves entirely.
This all became, you would think, a moot point on Saturday 19th April. During the pre-show for night one of Wrestlemania, WWE made the shock announcement that they had purchased AAA. El Hijo del Wagner Jr is one of the few wrestlers we know to be under contract to AAA, and so it seems he has ended up working for the company he turned down just two months ago anyway.
For my sins, my reviews of AAA’s often frustrating Triplemania shows are among the most read and well-received entries on my blog, and so several of my wrestling friends reached out and asked me my thoughts on this news. At this stage, it’s difficult to know exactly what a WWE-helmed AAA looks like - to what extent there will be any sense of “business as usual”, or if AAA merely becomes “NXT Mexico” in all but name - but my instinctive response is that this is the worst thing to happen to professional wrestling in decades. This isn’t NXT:UK running roughshod over the British independent scene - the significance of which I feel was considerably overstated, or else at least rendered moot by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic having a far worse and longer lasting impact on independent live events of all kinds - it’s closer to the WWE purchase of WCW and the closure of ECW. In many ways, it could be worse.
WWE shutting down its closest competition back in 2001 ushered in an era of near total monopoly, but it left a gap in the market for the creation of NWA:TNA, while the collapse of ECW created the impetus for the creation of Ring of Honor, and the independent wrestling boom of the early 2000s - it may have taken us a long way to get there, but you could draw a direct line from that moment through to the rebirth of independent wrestling in multiple countries, the resurgence of NJPW, at least two complete rethinks in WWE’s in-ring style between the rise of CM Punk and Daniel Bryan and the glory days of Triple H’s NXT, and to the entire existence of AEW. Simultaneously, the death of WCW left pay-per-view providers scrambling to find a substitute for the regular monthly income that came of pro-wrestling pay-per-view, and led them to turn to the once-maligned UFC, ushering in their rise from niche interest to pop culture behemoth - one could argue that the butterfly effect of that particular outcome hasn’t exactly been a net positive, but let’s stick to pro-wrestling, and simply say that the influence of a resurgent UFC over the past 25 years has been undeniable. We don’t yet know if a WWE-owned AAA would run a full, regular schedule in Mexico, though my instinct says no. We don’t know how long a WWE-helmed AAA will continue to exist as anything like an independent entity, and my instinct says it would be lucky to see out five years. It’s entirely possible that there are unforeseen outcomes to WWE muscling into Mexico that, like the doomsday scenario of WWE wiping out its competition north of the Rio Grande, end up being broadly beneficial to wrestling as a whole - but I doubt it.
The excellent Luchablog wrote in greater detail and with far more expertise than I can offer about the background of this sale, what we know about it, and the likely outcomes. I will try not to go over too much of the same ground that he has already covered, and stick to my own thoughts on this situation, but there will doubtless be some overlap.
WWE has rarely played well with others; their “partnerships”, whether with UK independent promotions in the 2010s, with select American and Japanese organisations today, or with ECW and USWA in the 1990s, were marriages of convenience, intended to provide a bulwark against WCW in the past and AEW today. Indeed, after months of gossip about a potential working relationship, it can hardly be a coincidence that WWE’s parent company TKO Group Holdings only made the move to purchase AAA outright less than a week after AEW had announced plans to run events at Arena Mexico, the prestigious homebase of their Mexican partner promotion CMLL, arch-rivals to AAA.
The timing of the announcement could scarcely have been more apt; WWE celebrating a new “working relationship” on the same weekend that they booked the World Champion of their previous lauded working relationship, Joe Hendry of TNA, to lose clean in a three minute comedy match. It doesn’t bode well. Much has been made of how AAA management were in attendance to see the sole Lucha-coded match on the Wrestlemania card - Rey Fenix vs. El Grande Americano - in which the Mexican babyface was booked to lose as much through their own idiocy as through the heel’s chicanery, and how the heel was an American wrestler working a comedy gimmick as a pretend luchadore, complete with dubbed “Mexican” accented voice; it’s not exactly the ringing endorsement of a style of wrestling, or a respect for the heritage of Lucha Libre, that one might expect to follow such a historic announcement. To that, though, I would add that flag-waving over-the-top jingoism from American heels has been AAA’s bread and butter since day one.
The announcement itself was a little eyebrow-raising too - Triple H and Michael Cole as WWE representatives, surrounded by key figures from AAA and, seemingly, every Mexican wrestler they had to hand, standing by as a representation of how AAA “creates stars” for WWE, as if the entire purpose of wrestling outside of WWE was as a vast talent pool for potential future WWE employment - that the line-up of stars included Stephanie Vaquer, who has never worked for AAA, and Andrade, who had all of two matches there in two years and whose relationship with the company was contentious at best. Nor should it fill any current AAA talent hoping to make it big in WWE with hope that Triple H, in singing the praises of current WWE acts, pointed to Santos Escobar and Los Garzas, wrestlers who may as well be in witness protection for all the exposure WWE gives them - Escobar having not won a match since last August, and not having wrestled on pay-per-view in over a year, and the Garzas not being seen by a PPV audience since Survivor Series 2021, and that being in a stakes-free and long forgotten Battle Royal.
In one of the more surreal moments of Wrestlemania, AAA’s once golden boy El Hijo del Vikingo got involved in the match between Rey Fenix and El Grande Americano. Vikingo had long since dropped off AAA’s top spot following a spate of injuries - even as the AAA Mega Champion, the promotion never treated him as the star he was, seeing him only as a vehicle to create GIFs and “viral moments”, booking him barely any differently than when he was a nobody in opening match scrambles. He was skyrocketed from the undercard to the main event picture solely because Kenny Omega was impressed by him and wanted to work with him, and the moment Vikingo was out of the picture, AAA reverted to type, putting their belt on an aging, broken down Alberto El Patron - who wouldn’t be worth the top spot even without a metric ton of personal baggage - and falling back into the never-ending cycle of heel stables and power struggles that have typified the company since the late 2000s.
Something that seems almost guaranteed is that WWE will have a vested interest in presenting Vikingo as a star, at least in the early going. This has nothing to do with cultivating an audience in Mexico, though that may be a happy side effect, but with another PR victory - Vikingo was briefly a featured act in AEW, during their working relationship with AAA, and for him to debut for WWE would be another indication that WWE is the place to be, that hotly sought after international stars are choosing them over the competition. That Vikingo didn’t choose WWE, but will end up working there because of a corporate acquisition, is neither here or there.
If it had been up to me, if it were at all possible, I would have featured Vikingo on the RAW after Wrestlemania. Perhaps I’m jumping the gun, and he will appear in a segment with Rey Fenix on Smackdown this week. After introducing him as a character at Wrestlemania, it would seem smart business to try and involve him on television while his appearance is still fresh in the audience’s memory, and the news of the AAA acquisition is still a talking point. But it doesn’t bode well for Vikingo, or for the respect that WWE - and Triple H in particular - claim to have for AAA and for “traditional lucha libre” that of the three men on Wrestlemania’s English language commentary team, not one of them managed to pronounce Vikingo’s name correctly, while in all announcements and match graphics WWE took the liberty of cutting “El Hijo del” from his name altogether - perhaps quietly providing more insight on some of the objections El Hijo del Dr Wagner Jr may have had with the offer WWE had on the table for him.
But perhaps Vikingo not appearing on RAW (or Smackdown, presumably - we’ll see) fits. Konnan and other AAA loyalists, and WWE super-fanatics with a torturously irrational view of the situation, have long argued that AEW’s working relationship with AAA (and TNA for that matter) was one-sided, and that they didn’t do enough to help either promotion, despite AEW sending Cody Rhodes, Kenny Omega and the Young Bucks, among many others, to work AAA shows. But WWE’s relationship with partners really is lopsided. In AEW, wrestlers from NJPW and CMLL are generally treated as being on a similar level to AEW’s roster, bar perhaps the very upper echelon; it’s the equivalent of a football team acquiring an exciting foreign player on loan, and the understanding is that a wrestler can be a star in their own company even if they have a limited presence on American TV - this is, historically, one of the easiest and most logical ways to present a new talent on television, and one of the simplest for the audience to understand, with the exception of those quarters of the audience whose brains have been irreversibly poisoned by wrestling tribalism and hack podcasts. But in WWE, WWE is the “big leagues”, and necessarily a significant step up from anywhere else in the wrestling world. To have been a champion in Mexico, or Japan, or anywhere else, doesn’t matter, because it didn’t happen in front of a WWE audience. To that end, AAA, like TNA before them, aren’t being treated as relative equals to WWE in an even business relationship - their wrestlers are not expected to mix it up with the stars of RAW and Smackdown, and their first representation on WWE TV is likely to be either at or during the build to Worlds Collide on June 7th, and exclusively on WWE’s developmental programme, NXT. In addition to this show being on WWE’s third brand, it will air in the afternoon, prior to WWE’s main roster Money In The Bank pay-per-view that same day, casting it very clearly in a second or third-tier position in WWE’s hierarchy.
The timing is beyond telling. Worlds Collide will be followed, one week later, by AAA’s Triplemania Regia from Monterrey - coming just three days before AEW’s Grand Slam Mexico. From both the US and Mexican angles, WWE is trying to cover all bases - to make AEW’s effort look like they were following WWE’s lead, rather than the other way around, in cross-promoting with a Lucha Libre promotion, and by trying to flood the zone; at best they are trying to attract more media attention for their co-promotion, and to force fans curious about a US/Mexican co-promoted show to reconsider where their money might best be spent. But the worst case scenario is far more aggressive - counter-programming is WWE’s route one approach to competition, and they’re unlikely to stop there. If WWE/AAA can lure a big name talent away from CMLL - say, to appear unexpectedly as this freshly announced Triplemania Regia days before AEW at Arena Mexico - then the terms of this buy-out will really become clear.
Lucha Libre is a very different business to professional wrestling in the United States, and I will not profess to understand it - the previously linked Luchablog post does an excellent job of spelling out how AAA acts as a booking and licensing agency as much as it’s a traditional wrestling promotion - and it remains to be clear if WWE will make the effort to understand it, or to keep key figures in posts where they can do the understanding for them. I suspect, however, that they have no interest in learning, or continuing with AAA as business as usual.
My suspicion is that the number of regular AAA shows will strip down to the bare minimum necessary to maintain existing TV commitments, while licensed shows will become a thing of the past. WWE have no interest in maintaining a healthy wrestling scene in Mexico, or cultivating the next generation of Lucha Libre talent; they are in Mexico to fight a proxy war against AEW, by undermining that company’s involvement with CMLL, either until CMLL back down from that partnership altogether, or until CMLL become an unwitting casualty of a fight that they never asked for.
That is not to say that I think WWE run CMLL out of business. I think that’s close to impossible to do. But I do think WWE’s version of AAA will focus all of its efforts on locations where CMLL ordinarily run - that is, Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Puebla - with conveniently timed forays into the US, particularly Texas and California, whenever AEW shows are planned there, particularly should CMLL talent be involved. I would put significant money on some variety of AAA or NXT/AAA show taking place the same weekend as AEW’s All In: Texas, for example, particularly if CMLL talent are expected to have any involvement on that show. All of this will be in the service of presenting a bigger, more premium product than AEW - and by extension CMLL - are able to offer - this has been the WWE game plan since the 1990s, and I see no reason why they would change now.
CMLL are stubborn. They were stubborn when booker Antonio Peña and top star Konnan broke away in 1992 to form AAA in the first place, citing CMLL’s traditional approach to lucha libre being stuck in its ways and behind the times, and offering too few opportunities for younger talent, and they’ve got hardly any less stubborn since. They are, historically, isolationist, and any working relationship - such as the one they have with NJPW - being hard fought for, well earned, and long-lasting. That they have opened their doors to AEW, and to RevPro in the UK, and become something of an internet favourite thanks to a top tier of genuinely phenomenal talent, must have come as something of a shock to a company usually more than happy to plod along doing business as usual. I do not think that CMLL are well equipped to fight a war with WWE, and I think they will take at best only minimal effort to be an active participant in that war. It is simply not in their nature. They will not - and for the most part, financially speaking can not - make serious counter-offers for any talent (or, if tactics get truly dirty, office staff) that WWE attempt to sign away. Short of rank incompetence on WWE’s part or outside intervention, the best case outcome I can see for CMLL in this situation is that they return to quietly plugging away doing what they’ve always done, and aren’t measurably any worse off for it, but their brief time in the sun for foreign fans will come to an end. The worse scenario is that WWE, or whatever AAA becomes with TKO’s backing, takes aim at supplanting CMLL as the tourist destination lucha libre in Mexico City, even potentially going after market stall mask sellers who stock AAA-trademarked designs, in which case it becomes a battle of wealth vs. tradition, and without intervention, I don’t see tradition faring too well in that fight.
That’s the second time I mentioned outside intervention, and this is something I genuinely think is a possibility. Lucha Libre is a very different proposition to American professional wrestling, and sits in a unique cultural position. I know people who would never dream of attending a wrestling show, but saw Lucha Libre in Mexico as part of the tourist experience. A dear friend of mine lived in Mexico for many years, and told me how, when she first moved to Mexico City, was told by a colleague, “if you want to understand Mexico City, you must understand Lucha”, and was taken to Arena Mexico. Beyond Mexico’s borders, the Lucha mask is an iconic go-to representation of Mexicana - plastered on the walls of Mexican restaurants and salsa bottles alongside decorated calavera or sugar skulls, as instantly recognisably Mexican as El Tricolor. Beyond one wrestling promotion purchasing another, this is an American corporation purchasing a Mexican family-owned business that produces an iconic Mexican cultural property - not only that, but a distinctly Donald Trump-affiliated American corporation, at a time that Mexico’s broadly left-wing President Claudia Sheinbaum needs to remain bullish against Trump’s tariffs and not be seen as acquiescing to American pressure. It is not difficult to envision a politician or other public figure taking up the case of AAA and Lucha Libre, not necessarily as a cause célèbre in its own right, but certainly as a metaphor for the battle between right-wing American corporate interests and the Mexican economy and national identity - it would be far from the first time that the imagery of Lucha Libre was put to political ends.
It feels morbidly appropriate that the news of AAA selling up to WWE broke the same weekend as the news of the death of the legendary luchadore Black Terry.
Black Terry never worked for AAA - though he worked just about everywhere else in Mexico. His career spanned fifty years, from the top of the card in UWA and CMLL, to maestro or legends spots in a dizzying array of independent promotions, to bloody brawls in the junkyard of Zona 23. The comparison that instantly comes to mind is to Terry Funk; here too was a wrestler who grew, changed, adapted, and made an artform of the limitations of an aging body, who kept a keen eye on how wrestling developed and changed over time, seeking to understand and follow trends, rather than going down the route of the old “back in my day” curmudgeon. These are the veterans that uplift professional wrestling, and ensure the health of its future.
But Black Terry was also, to outside eyes, an atypical luchadore. It’s something of a pet hate of mine that the term “Lucha” is so often used interchangeably with “high flying”; understood as a style that’s all about dives, masks, and hurácanranas (and don’t get me started on how nobody knows what a true hurácanrana is any more!). Lucha Libre is more than that. Lucha Libre is Black Terry, whether in the Llave maestro mode of tying opponents up in incomprehensible holds, or the wild, fist-flailing, bloodletting of an angry old man fight - something that, at its best, AAA excelled that.
Which brings us back around to the mask of El Hijo del Dr Wagner Jr. One of the reasons I am worried for the future of lucha libre now that WWE have muscled their way into the marketplace is that WWE have a very narrow vision of what a professional wrestler should be, how they should look, and how they should move; and their idea of what a luchadore should be is narrower still - so narrow as to not welcome the iconic mask of one of Lucha’s most storied families.
WWE have apparently been presented with a list of thirteen wrestlers under contract to AAA (I’ve also seen this list interpreted as the list that they intend to keep, but I’m going to assume Luchablog’s interpretation of it as a list of those under contract is correct). I have not seen the list, and aside from a few obvious names, I won’t pretend to know who is on it, or exactly who WWE would be interested in. But I can hazard some educated guesses as to who they are not interested in - older wrestlers like the 65 year old legend Negro Casas, or the 49 year old Chessman, or occasional visiting guest stars like L.A. Park, Dr Wagner Jr., or Blue Demon Jr., nor undercard comedy acts like the excellent Mr. Iguana, or aging exoticos like Pimpinela Escarlata. They may wish to, and most likely should, keep Psycho Clown, but I don’t foresee the remainder of the Psycho Circus being high on WWE’s list of priorities.
What WWE want from a “Lucha” promotion will likely be more or less reiterations of what they already have - smaller wrestlers, with masks, and a high-flying moveset. The likes of Laredo Kid, and Octagon Jr., will be top of the list, while the brawlers, the comedians, and the outright oddballs, and the aging headliners that are often more trouble than their worth, will either fall by the wayside, or will have their interesting edges sandpapered off, forcing round pegs into square holes, turning them into “WWE Superstars”. I already feel that the gradual homogenisation of professional wrestling has been to its detriment; regional differences in style and approach dissolving into a single rote approach, where a match from England is interchangeable with one from the West Coast of America, from Tennessee, from Montreal, or from Tokyo. Lucha Libre has not escaped unaffected, far from it, but its roots were deep enough to withstand the industry-wide trend of blindly following WWE’s lead - it is still a distinct style, but this is the largest, most active step in the wrong direction that it has ever taken.
Perhaps this will be the refresh that Lucha Libre needs. Perhaps, like AAA was born from frustrations with CMLL, a group of AAA wrestlers and office staff will club together and form their own breakaway promotion. Perhaps a money man will see a gap in the market. Perhaps existing Lucha promotions club together and fill the void left by an independent AAA. Perhaps a new major player rises. But this is Lucha Libre. We have seen a thousand shiny new promotions come and go, some lasting one or two shows, some disappearing between the announcement and the first event. Luchadores are famously self-serving, maximising their camera time, going into business for themselves, putting themselves over at all costs, because they are their business, they are their brand, and protecting that brand above all else is what matters. It is a mentality that makes for compelling stories and dramatic matches, but it’s a poor starting point for collective action, and I’m not optimistic that the broader Lucha Libre community have what it takes to put up a defensive front against the encroachment of WWE.
Let’s not pretend that AAA was perfect. It fell far, far short of that. Their booking was infuriating, their shows riddled with inconsistencies, bad matches, and worse production. They were a chaotic disaster of a promotion, and in some ways WWE may be an improvement on that. But within that chaos was the kind of occasional brilliance that can only be born of chaos, never of the glossy, micro-managed and over-produced content mill of WWE. WWE’s Performance Center and NXT could never create an El Hijo del Vikingo. WWE could never create matches as wild and bloody and staggeringly brilliant as Blue Demon Jr vs. Dr Wagner Jr, as L.A. Park vs. La Parka, as Pentagon Jr vs. Villano IV - these are matches born of a particular time, place, and philosophical approach to professional wrestling that is almost diametrically opposed to WWE’s. A WWE-owned AAA all but guarantees that, in AAA at least, all of that chaos, for good or for ill, is a thing of the past. I can honestly say that I will miss it.
