Wrestlers to hours in a show?

[BigFatCat999]

I'm coming to you oh sages of wrestling with a question.

How many wrestlers do you need on a roster per hour of a show. WWE has 50 on Smackdown. (You only really see 25 it seems) What is a good number?

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[M.C.G. 31]

I see you, Chris.

 

[Kimi]

It completely depends on how you run the show.


A big aspect would be how fast you are going to book. As in how quickly you are going to go from one feud to the next. WWE book on a monthly PPV cycle, so they can have a lot of turn over, thus require a large roster to keep the churn going. NXT book to Takeovers that are ~10 weeks apart, so everything is a lot slower.

The kind of show you are going to make will also factor in. WWE main roster shows have a lot of wrestling between big stars, but if you look at old NWA stuff you see far more squash matches with random jobbers. Even if they were to book for monthly PPVs, you'd need very different roster structures. NXT falls somewhere in the middle, but closer to WWE than old NWA.

It'll also matter on how willing you are to use outsiders in a notable roll. I could probably book a years worth of weekly one-hour TV episodes with a permanent ten to twelve man roster, but I'd need to use outside guys for multi-month runs to keep things going how I'd like (plus jobbers ofc).

And then there is how much exposure are you willing to give. WWE have their guys out there constantly, but there's a good argument for leaving guys off of TV for a while to keep them fresher for when you need them. Less exposure will mean needing a bigger roster.


But for Smackdown specifically, it's probably the correct size for what WWE do with it. It's probably slightly larger than you'd need for TV alone, but they need to have full house show cards three nights a week too, so they carry a little extra at the low end.