Triple H Addresses Concern In The UK Indie Scene, WWE Talents Working UK Indies, Promoters
As noted, Triple H participated in a media call this week to promote Saturday's WWE NXT "Takeover: San Antonio" event. You can listen to the call above.
In regards to the company pulling some of the WWE UK talents from working local indie events and concern that WWE is about to start the beginning of the end of the European scene, Triple H said:
"There's a lot of confusion based on that, and a lot of the confusion is people's refusal to acknowledge the reality of the situation. We signed talent as a part of this UK tournament and are looking forward to doing hopefully what will become a weekly show over there. The talent knew what the deal was, they knew what the restrictions were and they knew what the restrictions weren't. We're not restricting them from working for anybody as long as it's not distributed, as long as there's no distribution outside of the live event. Some of these promotions tried to come in after the face and add a distribution component to that. Talent didn't sign up for that to start with, they just had that added coming off of the success of what we did or whatever they were working on. That's a change. That's a change in how the talent were being dealt with. Talent had an agreement to go to an event to compete on a live event, not to do other things and that's a change.
We're not heavy-handing anybody, we're asking them to approve, to work with us, to work with the groups that are... and I was very clear about this when I was over there, we want to work with groups that are cultivating talent, not groups that are just coming in and just one-offing talent. So, is there a period of time right now we're allowing guys to work for people? Absolutely. Every single one of these talents knew the deal, they knew the deal going into it, they knew what the ask was and they knew what their restrictions were. Coming out the other side of it, there's a lot of confusion but it's not on our side and it's not on the talent side I believe. It's on the promoters side, who just kind of change things and do things however they feel like they want to do things. Trust me, there are a lot of... you can call them promotions but there are a lot of people who do one-off shows over there and there's a big difference. All of this is strategic. You're going to see a lot of announcements over a short period of time where I think all the questions that you're asking now and all the fears that everybody has will go away. People are going to go, 'Oh, it's very clear what they were doing right now.' But obviously because it's strategic, you can't come right out and say those things."
Triple H earlier praised the talents who worked the WWE UK Title tournament, saying he looks forward to working with them more in the future as the goal is a weekly UK show.