It Could Be Said #25 How Do You Solve A Problem Like PROGRESS?
What would it take to make nu-PROGRESS a success?
Recently on both POST Wrestling and Grappl Spotlight, Richard Benson spoke about how he had been approached by people connected to the new regime in PROGRESS who were seeking advice about what to do with what was once arguably the biggest indie promotion in the work. That got me thinking, what tips would I give to people trying to make PROGRESS a success?
What Do We Mean By Success?
One of the things that it would be useful to define is what do we mean by PROGRESS being successful? The neighbouring promoters that rival their scale (OTT, Revolution Pro-Wrestling, and WXW) all have a clear goal – earn enough money to keep the owners from having to get regular jobs. The major live events are a small part of a wider web of activity with smaller spot shows, training schools, and holiday camp, festival or carnival shows all important revenue streams. That was never really PROGRESS’s business model1, which instead sought to regular run a loop of shows that draw more than 700 fans complimented by overseas tours, supershows, and heavy merchandise business.
The benefit of that approach was that it meant they could focus on building a brand that appealed to hardcore wrestling fans, rather than making weird detours to appeal to other audiences. The negative is that it relied on drawing an unusually large number of fans, a level that the promotion was struggling to meet even before the pandemic and Speaking Out. But just like the original three mates, the new owners come from outside wrestling and surely have no interest or ability to work the multitude of angles that (say) Andy Quildan run to make a career in pro-wrestling.
But the problem is surely bigger than that; if the way to success is to mirror other promotions, then why buy PROGRESS? Especially when considering Jon Briley what paid himself as a dividend last summer, he may have easily charged Lee McAteer and Martyn Best six figures for what is a badly damaged brand.
But still, as Barry Glendenning once explained on Football Weekly, the punchline “I wouldn’t start from here”, is a joke at the expense of the idiot giving unhelpful directions, so let’s try to give them some useful advice.
#1 Alternate Between Electric Ballroom and O2 Ritz Manchester
When I was on British Wrestling Experience in the immediate aftermath of the sale being announced, I expressed immediate concern at how many shows they were planning to run London. Then and now I suspect that even monthly shows in the Electric Ballroom are too frequent based on current fan interest, but that issue has only been exacerbated by them running three extra shows in other London venues in March and a double-header in the Ballroom this month. Invariably there was little interest in the latter, although I didn’t envisage it would bomb so hard that they had to be in a venue with barely a fifth of the capacity – and they still didn’t sell out2.
The solution is that they should set up the O2 Ritz Manchester as a home of equal standing to the Ballroom. Manchester is oddly underserved as a wrestling market, especially considering that (relatively) nearby Wolverhampton is no longer a Britwres hotbed. Alternating between London and Manchester means that the remaining mutants who will travel to get a monthly fix of PROGRESS receive that, but the local fans can make it a regular habit without being asked to attend monthly shows. It also allows PROGRESS to focus their PR efforts on two markets, using local media and partnerships to reach pro-wrestling fans who may have never heard of PROGRESS even during the Britwres Boom.
#2 No More Tours, Almost No More Weekenders
It is always important to remember that PROGRESS’s expansion out of London and Manchester happened after the bloom was off the rose. They never quite got Birmingham right, even with all the West Midlands talent they were booking at the time, and the towns they added in 2019 got shafted even harder. Running so many locations was a way to exploit fans who hadn’t been able to get to Manchester or London for the genuinely big shows, a strategy that only makes sense when the product is hot. The effort involved would be better spent making the London and Manchester shows as successful, so the brand recaptures the cache it once had.
Another issue with running additional shows is that it complicates the VOD schedule. There is nothing worse as a fan trying to follow Britwres promotions from afar than watching helpless as promotions struggle to turnaround a deluge of content caused by weekenders let alone weeklong tours. PROGRESS’s current schedule of releasing shows a week after they happen is at the very outer bounds of what is acceptable, but in these situations, the last show drops on VOD long after people stopped caring. The multi-town weekenders were even worse because fans wouldn’t what had been set up the week before.
Given how big not just Super Strong 16 but Fight Club Pro’s Dream Tag Team Invitational became, you would hope that PROGRESS would be able to present at least one big weekender as a tentpole where more fly-ins can be brought in. I am however unconvinced that sixteen-person tournament is the right format; it’s striking how little buzz there was for WXW’s 16 Carat this year. I suspect that SSS16 was another example of PROGRESS identifying ways to crest the wave of the Britwres and wider indie wrestling boom; it was built on the promise of guaranteed large crowds, a deep domestic talent roster, and fly-ins wanting to prove themselves on what had became a globally renowned stage. None of those things exist now. I would say an eight-person match tournament that was split between London and Manchester should be the extent of weekenders until the scene recovers3.
#3 Cut Cards Down To No More Than Six Matches, Leverage Superior Payoffs
If there is one that makes my eyes glaze over when looking at a PROGRESS card, it’s the parade of usual suspects that can be seen on much cheaper shows all over the country. This is one the two big ways the promotion suffers in comparison to RevPro, which tends to be more circumspect about booking the latest flavour of the month on undergraps Twitter.
Obviously Quildan can fill his shows with trainees and mid-tier fly-ins that can be occupied through the smaller shows before being showcased in York Hall. PROGRESS can’t do that, so should go for the next best option of cutting the number of matches down. With the padded nature of today’s pro-wrestling, you can easily deliver enough minutes of action to satisfy fans with only six matches. And doing so gives you the freedom to be more discerning about what you book on the undercard, plus saves some money on the flipside.
Unlike RevPro, PROGRESS has long had a reputation as a promotion that paid exceptionally well by Britwres standards, maybe too well, in the sense that it made it impossible for pro-wrestlers to turn down terrible roles in the promotion even as they were gathering steam as headliners in smaller promotions. As of yet, there has been no suggestion the new owners have significantly reduced payoffs.
That gives PROGRESS leverage. At the very least they should be able to tell people they book to not undercut them by appearing the next night on smaller shows in the same market as a big PROGRESS show. Likewise, if there’s talent that they’re committed to booking for full year, they should offer contracts. They could use those deals to keep star performers away from rivals like RevPro, or simply to dragoon smaller promotions into lopsided arrangements such as PROGRESS having creative control over how performers are booked in other promotions. Hell, they could even go full TNA, and charge the smaller promotions a booking fee for using their talent.
More than that, developing a contracted roster of performers would allow them to provide them with the stability platform to build compelling storylines, both through in-ring angles and shoulder content on social media. What set PROGRESS apart was never the quality of its matches but its storytelling, but ever since it became a promotion that cherrypicked from smaller ones, it has badly lost its way in this area. If I was the new owners I would be very tempted to reach out to the former crew behind Riptide to see if they would be interested in taking a lead on crafting storylines and developing interview segments.
#4 Carefully Exhume Britwres’s Glory Days
Things seemed to have calmed down but in the immediate aftermath of the partnership with Liverpool’s TNT promotion, there was hyperventilating in some quarters that PROGRESS was trying to buyup all of Britwres. I think the past couple of months has vindicated my suspicion that the partnership is more about a couple of football club directors needing someone with actual experience of running a pro-wrestling promotion to handle the booking for them.
But in any case, I will take this opportunity to strongly urge PROGRESS against becoming a one-stop shop for Britwres VOD. The idea that every indie needs to have its matches recorded and shared digitally worldwide is again one of those habits that Britwres got into during the boom period, but that no longer stands up to scrutiny, especially as pivotshare have clamped down on hosting promotions whose customer base is so small, the service’s cut of sales won’t cover the bandwidth’s cost. PROGRESS clogging up DEMAND PROGRESS with indies only devalues the service and promotion.
Instead, they should try their best to buy the rights to as much of what still exists of Britwres’s glory days. Not only will that ensure old brands don’t come back to complicate their push to dominate Britwres, but those old shows can be cut and spliced into content that would be of interest to hardcore wrestling fans. The most obvious example is Fight Club: PRO; whilst uploading fullshows would be virtually impossible given everything we now know, there’s enough permissible matches featuring genuine stars, that eye-catching compilations could be produced.
#5 Develop A Network of Training Schools
If there was a boom in Britwres after 2017, it was as a participation sport rather than a spectator one. More and more people wanted to become pro-wrestlers, and more and more people wanted to be paid to train them. That worryingly few genuinely good wrestlers have been produced from this boom in wrestling school attendance is besides the point – look at how much food was put on people’s tables by training them.
PROGRESS as the biggest promotion in the country should be trying to get a cut of that. Rather than go through the hassle of establishing their own training school, they could offer themselves up as the solution to schools’ lack of regulation and standardisation. PROGRESS could offer themselves up as a service provider for pro-wrestling schools, not just developing policies and procedures for them, but helping them secure insurance, guest seminar instructors, advertising, etc. Given their links with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Wrestling, I’m sure PROGRESS could even get praised in Parliament for helping to promote safeguarding best practice. And in time such a network would give PROGRESS first pick of the next generation of performers rather than constantly scrounging around smaller promotions for whoever is hot4, a strategy which again only makes sense when the whole scene is thriving.
#6 Drop The Nostalgic Gimmicks, Protect The Brand
Since taking over the promotion, PROGRESS’s new owners have tried to win over fans with nostalgic gimmicks such as bringing back the Atlas Title or return to The Garage for a 10th Anniversary show. Obviously there’s been varying degrees of success, but the problem with such moves is that they smack of a brand stuck in the past throwing stuff at the wall, in a desperate attempt to reclaim former glories. Indeed, it raises uncomfortable comparisons with when Ring of Honor exhumed the PURE division, and we all know what happened there. Given that it was explicitly founded on eschewing nostalgia for the golden days of British wrestling, PROGRESS is a forward-looking promotion or it is nothing. That irreverence towards history should also apply to its own.
Likewise, PROGRESS needs to be more careful about protecting its brand, which after all is what Lee McAteer and Martyn Best paid all that money for. I understand the temptation to run For The Love of Wrestling, the first was a huge event, but does being an exhibit amongst the wider celebrity zoo actually suit the promotion’s self-image? I can’t help but suspect that until very recently the promotion wouldn’t have wanted to be seen dead in such a corporate and family friendly environment. PROGRESS should be trying to do corporate tie-ups that rebuild its youth orientated image, such as trying to return to DOWNLOAD music festival or seeing if they could become the latest promotion to feature as part of the INSOMINA video game weekender.
#7 Get Better Main Events
As I wrote back in 2021, the big problem that PROGRESS was facing, was that their main event scene was not as strong nor as fresh as their nearest competitor. Whilst the standard of PROGRESS’s main events has gotten better lately, so have RevPro’s, with Michael Oku vs Will Ospreay one of the best matches in the world this year.
Worse, their big move to revitalise their main event scene has been a flop. I’m a huge fan of Jonathan Gresham but whatever PROGRESS is paying him to work this many dates, he’s not worth it. Gresham was never a singles headliner for the big promotions during the Britwres boom, and when he’s headlined smaller indies, they’ve never sold out. It is another sign of PROGRESS booking to pop a small niche of fans on Twitter rather than being cleareyed about who is and isn’t a draw in the UK.
The problem of course for PROGRESS is that it’s not clear what the better alternatives are. The WWE Network being so leery about showcasing Gresham further compounds the group’s difficulties. It took longer than many of us thought, but WWE has finally switched from gleefully parading its competitors’ talent as a cool perk for Network subscribers, to fearing that using them is somehow helping their competitors. You would have to assume that would mean PROGRESS would struggle to use New Japan contracted talent such as Will Ospreay and Zack Sabre, nevermind AEW’s PAC.
It's a bit desperate, but now that coronavirus restrictions are behind us and WWE are starting to share NXT UK talent a bit more freely, I would ask NXT UK if either Trent Seven or Tyler Bate were available to be PROGRESS champion. They’re the closest to genuine stars still left in the UK that WWE wouldn’t raise an objection to them featuring on the Network, and as their belated run with the NXT UK tag titles is proving, they can still go in the ring. Bate would be perfect for the role of fighting world champion, facing fly-in superstar of the month, with the matches reheating him up as a singles star.
Of course, if WWE won’t lend NXT UK talent, whilst also making it difficult for you to use other promotion’s talent, then you ever so slightly fucked. In that case I would be very tempted to go grovelling back to Michael Oku, apologise for the disgraceful way the previous regime treated him, and see if you can convince him that PROGRESS are better positioned to build a company around him than RevPro, given how Quildan’s links to New Japan always complicate the booking of RevPro’s heavyweight title.
Conclusion
It cannot be stressed that the road back for PROGRESS is going to be extremely hard, and if it were my money, I would not have bought the promotion. But Lee McAteer and Martyn Best are where they are, and short of building a time machine, they are going to have to act smartly and decisively to rescue the situation. More than that they are going to have to invest serious money in rebuilding PROGRESS from the ground up, and hope that they secure a return on that investment in the years ahead.
Hmmmmm….maybe they should just try to build that time machine?
They did dabble with having their own affiliated training school called Projo, but that ultimately went independent
It was pretty funny to see PROGRESS blame the issue on people not wanting to come to the wrestling on Easter when Britwres may have had its biggest weekend ever Easter 2017 when The Elite did a blockbuster tour
RevPro are dipping their toe back into the weekender warters for the first time since 2019 for their anniversary shows. Given that they run big shows far less frequently than PROGRESS, I am more optimistic that they could make that a success, but its still a risk.
It is striking that Projo going independent coincides in PROGRESS’s undercard becoming less distinctive. There is a reason most indie wrestling promotions use their training school to pad out their cards.