Day: January 25, 2007

It’s the half way point of the year in review, so it’s a good time for a break, and a chance to throw some random statistics at you. This is probably going to be the least newsworthy actual post, but it’s stuff I wanted to write about, so that’s what I’m doing.

Elsewhere on this site, I’ve been keeping track of all the shows and match results I could track down in 2006 and plugging them into a database. You see it turned into things like the wrestler cards or event lists. There’s a lot of events included which never actually made the news updates; if I cover every indy event, it detracts from pointing out the ones that actual matter. I’m sure I only get between 20% to 60% of the actual shows going on in Mexico at any time (and probably closer to the low side), but piled together, they do bring up some interesting patterns.

The upside of all this otherwise semi-pointless busy work is, at the end of the year, I can stack all the events up and check out some totals.

As of now, I’ve got at least a partial lineup for 2201 different lucha events – most in Mexico and a handful of US events. In those 2201 matches, I counted 9833 matches. That’s 4.4 per show; dragged down by shows where only partial lineups were announced (and results never mentioned) and dragged up by shows that featured tournaments.

Counting the participants in those matches is a little bit funky in my database. 422 of the guys I’ve identified and set up profile pages wrestled in 2006, and I’ve got 5803 ‘other’ wrestlers who participated in at least one match, but haven’t wrestled enough (or in a big enough place) to be counted. Some of that 5802 count is misspellings of other wrestlers or double counting of wrestlers who’ve switched gimmicks, so I wouldn’t claim 6225 wrestlers, but then I’m sure there’s a ton of guys who escaped notice all together.

I counted 858 different arenas as well, but there’s a high amount of duplication and misspelling there, so I wouldn’t take that number seriously.

I broke this down by promotion, and put in a table to save on the paragraphs. Anything featuring AAA or CMLL stars was recorded as such unless it was clearly supposed to be it’s own promotion (think IWRG) This reaches beyond the TV tapings and includes all the spot shows. (I don’t think I ever included the teleton, in case you’re wondering which area it goes in.)

   shows  matches  IDed wrestlers  Other wrestlers   Arenas
CMLL     664    3136         287           1389            164
AAA      389    1654         208           1289            278

You’ll notice that, even including every indy show where there was a name main event and a bunch of indy guys on the undercard, less than half of the total recorded lucha cards in Mexico were indy shows. The stars of lucha libre are the wrestlers people see on TV and in huge events, but the importance of the local indy guys should be noticed – those are the people fans outside of Mexico City are seeing on a more regular basis.

While I’m on frivolous database stats, here’s some current ones from the luchawiki.
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