CMLL 2010 Attendance Chart

CMLL’s biggest problem last year wasn’t conditions out of their control, like the economy or the security situation. It wasn’t the Invasors not having a strong enough leader or getting burned out too soon. It wasn’t competition. All of those things hurt, but CMLL’s biggest problem was CMLL itself. The hottest incident and the best run the company had all year came to an end when Mistico suddenly dropped the rudo turn. Business picked up again around the Anniversary show, but not for the length of the Mistico rudo wrong, and the rest of the year was weak. Whoever made the decision to end the rudo turn – the finger has never definitely been pointed – did the most damage to CMLL in 2010.

Major US promotions and AAA gauge their business by rating points. CMLL seems to be dimly aware they’re on television. They’re happy to sell parts of their shows to whatever network will pay, but seem to leave up to the network to make it interesting. (Most seem to fail at this.) CMLL’s uses more tangible indicators: tickets and gate money. They’re not letting us into the box office soon, but we do have some educated guesses. Between the Wrestling Observer Newsletter and other sources, we’ve got attendance estimations for about 3/4s of the Friday night shows, the ones that really matter. That does leave out two major shows that did well – Fabian’s cage match and Taichi/Maximo – and a Saturday night show to end the year that did poorly – Averno/Dragon Rojo – but it still a pretty accurate representation of the year that was.

(I’ve connected the dots where data is missing, to give a better idea of trends. If the end of the chart is cut off, you can see it in full here. And all the raw numbers are here, with every show’s main event.)

Almost all of CMLL’s 10K+ shows were squeezed into two periods.

* Mistico’s rudo turn: from teaming up with Averno in the Parajes Incriedble tournament, thru Dos Leyendas, up until the moment Mistico declared he was no longer going to be a rudos. The 10 week rudo stretch included 9 weeks of 9500+ attendance (we don’t have a number for the other week), more half of those such weeks in the year. The drop off wasn’t after the major show, but after Mistico declared his intention to resume being a tecnico, and even a Felino/Mistico singles match drew 2000 less than shows a month prior.

* Overlapping big match storylines around the anniversary show: this includes Mistico vs Psicosis (fifth best crowd of the year – which wasn’t seen as strong enough to do the mask vs mask match?), Lyger vs Sombra for the Universal Title, the Anniversary show, and Volador/Mistico for the Bicentential Cup. That last match drew 14,300. Our records are more spotty near the end of the year, but it doesn’t seem like there were back to back Fridays that drew that much the rest of the year, even if you added the two together.

The other two 10K shows: 01/01 (New Year’s Day special?) and 04/30 (Bracito de Oro vs Pequeno Warrior, Gran Alternativa final)

Those two stretches can be distilled as “a very hot storyline” and “a series of huge matches.” CMLL seems to be isolated on the tournaments instead. The Mistico run was kicked off by the same national tournament that repeats this week and the Universal and Bicentennial tournaments figured in the later stretch. The tournaments itself were never important; far fewer remember Atlantis & Mascara Dorada winning than Mistico wearing the horned mask. Mistico/Volador worked because it was a match the fans were anxious to see. The tournaments themselves are as worthless as the tiny cup they gave Volador; the big matches and stories are the draw, not the method of reaching them. It doesn’t feel like the people in charge agree, because the first set of teams announced for the latest tournament doesn’t seem to set up either a dream match or a new interesting storyline.

I’m pretty sure this post doesn’t tell regular readers anything they don’t know; Mistico as a rudo was more captivating than anything else CMLL has done since. If we can see that pretty easily, so did they. And yet, it still ended, and they didn’t even play at going back at it. CMLL’s going to shed some light on what’s going on with Mistico right now at this press conference today, but the mystery I’d really want solved is what happened 9 months ago.