WWE's lack of interest in the African market?

The Samoan Heritage

Getting Noticed By Management
To start, this isn't a "wwe is racist" discussion.
During the May young classic 2 parade of champions event, someone on youtube commented asking, "why weren't there any Africans in this tournament?" As expected, people responded saying that there were African Americans in the tournament, but the person would correct them saying that he was talking about someone "born and raised" in Africa.
He would then go on a rant about the less than handful of Africans that have ever been in wwe. How wwe has pushed Jinder/Khali to appease to the india market and Del Rio to Mexico, but never pushed Kofi to appeal to Africa's market (he also brought up Kofi's Jamaican gimmick and hating it).
He had some pretty good points...obviously enough for me to come here to try and learn more.

1. Pretty much, I was wondering if anyone knows why this may or may not be true? (maybe there aren't many wrestling promotions in Africa?)

2. Why doesn't wwe do a big signing/talent search while in South Africa? I've read reports about wwe scouting (and signing) talent while they were in Dubai, Asia, and the Uk, but never Africa.

3. Also,can you name any African talent currently in the indys that could potentially end up in wwe?
 
Didn't the WWE just do a tour of South Africa this year? Don't know if they were scouting but I do believe they were there.

Also the only African wrestlers that come to mind that have worked for the WWE are Kofi Kingston, Justin Gabriel and Adam Rose. I'm sure there are more well known wrestlers around. Maybe it's just that there isn't much exposure and they have to move elsewhere to get well known.
 
WWE is an American company based in America. Their main income comes from America. Africa is not where they are based. I don't even know if they have offices that operate in Africa.

They would need to setup scouts, talent, time, money in a place they probably don't pay all that much attention. That's the answer.

They were expanding into India so that's why Jinder was pushed.
 
They would need to setup scouts, talent, time, money in a place they probably don't pay all that much attention. That's the answer.

The title of this thread is "WWE's lack of interest in the African market". You then referred to Africa as "a place they probably don't pay all that much attention", laughably followed by "That's the answer." You realize that by confirming the question you are not giving "the answer", right?

He's asking why they don't have interest. You can't say they don't have interest because it's a place that they don't pay attention to. Scouts, talent, etc. are involved in all areas where they DO show interest. So, those points don't answer the question asked. The question is WHY DON'T they show interest in Africa? OR why DON'T they want to invest time, money, etc.?

The answer, of course, is that they want to avoid running into Akeem, with whom they have an unfriendly relationship.
 
The title of this thread is "WWE's lack of interest in the African market". You then referred to Africa as "a place they probably don't pay all that much attention", laughably followed by "That's the answer." You realize that by confirming the question you are not giving "the answer", right?

He's asking why they don't have interest. You can't say they don't have interest because it's a place that they don't pay attention to. Scouts, talent, etc. are involved in all areas where they DO show interest. So, those points don't answer the question asked. The question is WHY DON'T they show interest in Africa? OR why DON'T they want to invest time, money, etc.

Well actually it does answer the question. Why aren't they doing it? Because money/time. That seems to be the most logical answer. Especially since WWE is a business. My answer was they didn't have that setup and the implication of that is it wouldn't be worth it (not out of malice). There isn't any news about an expansion into Africa. No news about Africa paying them a shit ton to do an event there. But since you are being such a prick, I'll expand on the answer (which I love your answer....oh wait, you didn't put one).

The probable answer is they don't have any infrastructure there that can easily find talent. They might tour there but may not have any real connections to the wrestling scene there. They have that infrastructure in place in the UK (obviously). They are expanding into various countries in Asia (obviously) and were paid a shit ton of money to do an event specifically in Saudi Arabia (obviously).

I don't know Africa well enough to do a deep dive answer. Though I imagine the answer would ultimately be, time/money. Could be due to population size (Asia has more people), not paying them a shit ton to do an event there, infrastructure, etc. Searching WWE Africa tryouts gets you nothing. WWE Asia tryouts gets you results (India, Saudi Arabia, China).
 
First of all, let's remember that Africa is a continent and not a country. WWE does most shows in the US. They don't do shows in Haiti or Panama or Jamaica or Barbados. They do a handful of shows in Canada, in major cities, that get US programming and are primarily English speaking. Do they even do one show a year in Mexico? I don't know. They point is, they don't go everywhere and they can't go everywhere.

I don't know much about Africa, but I know there are a lot of areas not as developed as the US or other countries. They did go to South Africa as someone mentioned. But South Africa is South Africa. Congo is Congo. Egypt is Egypt. They're going to root for someone from their country, not their continent.

My guess is that a) the costs of traveling there and holding shows are too expensive, and b) there isn't a market. Why would they send "scouts" all over Africa? They can get plenty of talent in the US. And, on occasions, there were wrestlers originally from Africa. Even when I look it up, all I find are the aforementioned Adam Rose and Justin Gabriel.

The OP mentioned some people. But, Jinder and Khali are two people for a country of 1.3 billion and Jinder is Canadian. Del Rio, Mysterio, and Sin Cara are three people for all of Mexico. Kofi is actually from Ghana, so would they even push the Jamaican thing to an African market (which they don't have anyway, apparently). Selling Jamaica is easier than selling Ghana in the US.

Basically. If they saw they could make money there, they would go there.
 
You people are messing with me aren't you!?

Fine, I'll take the bait. There was once this wrestler from Nigeria named The Great Power Uti.

Here's a fun vid where Cliff Compton recalls the buildup to his fight with The Great Power Uti:

[youtube]hFuFpaGOtk0[/youtube]
 
There's a couple main reasons why there's very little WWE interest in Africa.
  1. There's no real country in Africa that can be exploited for profits. WWE has shown interest in places like India and China because each country has over a billion people, meaning if they can get into that one country they can increase their exposure exponentially, thus increasing their profits exponentially. They've also shown interest in Saudi Arabia because the very wealthy people gave them a ridiculous amount of money, thus increasing their profits greatly. The biggest African country that can be exploited for profit is probably South Africa or Egypt, and they can't provide nearly the amount of money as the aforementioned countries.
  2. The places WWE makes a big deal about traveling to either are the aforementioned profitable countries or are traditional wrestling hotbeds like the UK or Japan (or even Australia). In those markets where wrestling is already huge, they just need to fly over there and perform, which is exponentially cheaper then spending a ton of money on marketing, flying individuals over to promote the event, and hoping to get the people to want to show up.
The TL/DR version of this post: For smaller non-traditional wrestling countries, the monetary risk is too high for the comparatively small return return on investment.
 

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