Aleister Black Says WWE’s Shorter PLEs Make the Product Stronger – WWE has steadily moved toward tighter, easier-to-digest premium live events, often featuring only four or five major matches.

As AEW continues to deliver marathon shows that can stretch from five to seven hours, WWE’s streamlined approach has become a defining difference between the two companies. During a conversation on the Wrestle Rant podcast, Aleister Black explained why he believes WWE’s shift to shorter cards is the right call.

“Yeah, I think having less matches on PLEs, especially because they’re a lot more frequent, makes a lot more sense,” Black said. “Even back when I worked in Japan a lot, that was kind of like the given, five, six matches a night, because it keeps everything a lot more special. The second you go above, in my personal opinion, above the level of seven or eight matches, you’re going to wear out the crowd a lot. We live in an age where attention spans are very limited. Everything is a lot of gratification. So the longer you let something go for the sake of having people on the card, because you want to put people on the card, per se, that might be at the detriment of the product with the perceived experience by fans, and I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing, because there will always be people that are absolutely enjoying it from start to finish. But I think that I can say that having match cards that are excessively big will eventually work in the detriment of the, like I said, perceived experience itself. I think that WWE made a right call with limiting the matches a little bit because, again, like I said, it makes it easier to digest, gives you more time to divide your attention on the things that you want to pay attention to in terms of storytelling, and match quality.”

Black also reflected on the older WWE format, when cards regularly featured eight or nine bouts. He noted that the larger lineups often forced some matches to be cut down to just a few minutes due to time constraints, and even though being featured on a PLE could be difficult, the current pace of events helps balance that out.

“You know, even back then, like, yeah, there were moments where there were nine matches on a card, for instance, and, yeah, some people would get three minutes because time is short and we only have X amount of spots and stuff like that, where, yeah, I mean, you can make a case that it’d be harder to be on a PLE, but at the same time, the frequency of the PLEs has also increased. So I would say it evens itself out a little bit, but I definitely think that that is… in my personal opinion, always been the way forward where less is more.”

WWE’s next premium live event, Survivor Series: WarGames, takes place on Saturday, November 29, 2025, from Petco Park in San Diego, CA. The show continues WWE’s modern format, focusing on key matches and storylines without overloading the card.

Aleister Black Says WWE’s Shorter PLEs Make the Product Stronger

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