Select Answers: New Day, Non Competes, Unions, ESPN Unlimited (Patreon)

Welcome to Select Answers, a feature that provides some of the answers to questions that were posed to Sean Ross Sapp in the most recent Fightful Weekly Q&A Podcast. The show drops every week on Fightful Select for subscribers.

When aggregating these posts please refer to it as "Fightful Select Answers Q&A" and tag Fightful, noting that it was in the Q&A format to avoid confusion.

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Are fka New Day under the normal 90 waiting period?

Yes, they are. They will still be getting paid their original contracted salary during that period. I know a lot of people act like they or anyone else should forego that aren't really living in reality. They're getting paid a ton of money to plan their next move out.

Can a wrestler even talk about a new contract with another company during their noncompete period?

Tampering isn't a real thing in pro wrestling because there is no players association or union or anything like that. If WWE or AEW reached out to someone from the other company after they had been informed of a contract expiration or release, there is almost no court that would side with the company that just let them go.

As far as backlash and ESPN, many including me, get ESPN unlimited through their provider… but how can they justify only 3 matches on the PLE with 2 big time matches on ESPN. What’s the end game strategy and how do you think WWE cards will look moving forward with matches on ESPN and apples in general? Is this just a phase or something we ll see regularly built into PLE to sell ESPN unlimited. These are 2 great matches at Backlash that I can’t believe won’t be on the PLE but free.

The reality is they don't care. It's far beyond ESPN selling ESPN Unlimited subscriptions. ESPN and HULU are owned by the same company. They want you to get frustrated and change your entire cable package to HULU so you'll have all your channels and ESPN Unlimited. If they can use the ESPN main channel to help justify this, they will.

Are any talent (especially tippy top talent) interested in forming a union?

I've not heard any real discussion from any wrestling talent about seriously starting a union. It would be individual to the company, not across all of wrestling. So it would be like a WWE Player's Association or something like that. MMA fighters have been trying to get them off the ground for ages and it never worked for them.