Arn Anderson On When Vince McMahon Lost Interest In Tag Teams, FTR's Storytelling Ability

On a recent edition of "Ask Arn Anything" on the ARN podcast, WWE Hall of Famer Arn Anderson discussed Vince McMahon and WWE's shift away from tag team wrestling. Anderson said that during the Attitude Era, factions were becoming a big thing, and they kept growing bigger and bigger. The costs of transportation and other expenses for those factions grew too much, and Anderson believes that McMahon took that approach to tag teams as well.

"Well they went through a time up in the WWF," Anderson said. "I can't specifically tell you when it was, I bet you can though, where they went through all these factions, and I was in WCW at the time. Remember the factions, there were probably five, six, seven of them, and they had four or five guys in a group? You know Taker had The APA and all those guys with him. You had the guys from Puerto Rico. You had all these different factions, you had DX. All those guys and I would have just been guessing.

"Well when you started paying all those groups. When you would have the big shows and you would have a lot of those factions on there, man you had a lot of sets of trends. So, it went from being just a tag team to four guys, maybe five if there was a manager involved, but managers were starting to go away during that period as well. But if you met all those transportation costs to pay and all that, I measure it just get expensive and it's probably overwhelming so when he decided to peel back from factions and all that, he probably just included tag matches in the equation and that was a mistake."

FTR have been very outspoken about tag team wrestling and WWE's lack of enthusiasm for tag team wrestling. Dax Harwood and Cash Wheeler have also shared their praise for Anderson, and Anderson has said that the best of FTR has yet to be seen. Anderson recently talked more about FTR praising their ability to tell a story inb the ring.

"I do believe, FTR, who I've been so high on, everyone's going to see the reason I was so high on them because they can be the one stabilizing effect of tag-teams," Anderson said. "They can wrestle all these different teams, allow everybody to do what they do but still, have a rhyme reason and a story to the match.

"That is what has been partly missing as far as the storytelling of what a tag match is supposed to be and these guys are in the role of being professors as far as that goes because they get it and they understand the why's and they're not going to hold anybody down or anybody back and prevent them from doing the spectacular stuff they do. I think they're just going to be in a position to put it where it goes and have it make sense and give you a little bit more of a structured tag match to what every wrestling fan of the last 30 years or 40 years has come to understand makes sense and I think you'll see more of that."

If you use any quotes from this article, please credit ARN with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.

Mehdy Labriny contributed to this article.