On the development side at least, WWE’s focus recently has been extremely international. From the London-based UK Performance Center and NXT UK to the Super Show-Down in Australia and the very controversial shows in Saudi Arabia, they’re all about building their global brand. In an interview with The National, a website based in the United Arab Emirates, Triple H talked specifically about international recruitment and where we can expect future performance centers.
He first spoke at length about how WWE’s international talent scouting works, and how it leads to the decision to establish a new Performance Center.
We will scour, we will go through those people, we will talk to them, we will whittle that down to the best of the best. We’ll bring them in to try out for us. They’ll come in for a few days, we’ll put them through some really hard stuff. But we’re not just looking to wear them out physically because what we’re looking for is, they wear down physically, we’re looking for how they handle that, mentally. What becomes of them? Are they leaders? When they get tired, do they help the person next to them? Or do they push the person next to them down, to try to succeed, themselves? It’s all part of the process.
We’ll then find talent, that we believe have the skill set and the right mentality to become WWE superstars. We’ve become very successful at that whittling down process. We’ll begin to look at them. Whether we bring them here, whether we bring them at first to the UK, when we feel like we’re beginning to see enough of that passion process and enough boiling up to the top, that we’re ready and we’re already looking at the process, I don’t want to say it’s like we’re waiting, we will have all the steps in place to then begin to execute a performance centre.
Asked more specifically about where future PCs are likely to be built, Triple H got more specific:
I can tell you there will be a performance centre in India. There will be a performance centre in the Middle East. There will, more than likely, be a performance centre in Latin America. We will be replicating this process around the globe, all over.
One immediate question is what country the Middle Eastern Performance Center will be in, and whether or not women will be allowed to train there. Given WWE’s relationship with the Saudi Arabian government, it’s tempting to assume that’s the only possible location. On the other hand, WWE also made news in the United Arab Emirates, when Sasha Banks and Alexa Bliss had the first women’s wrestling match in that countries history. If they build a PC there and allow women to train, that could actually be pretty cool. At the end of the interview, Triple H talks about the importance of that match:
I was there. I was there when Alexa and Sasha wrestled. I was there while there were people in the crowd, young boys, young girls, the entire crowd chanting, “This is hope.” That is massive. It doesn’t happen over night. But you can’t change if you’re not there.
