AJ Styles defeated Kevin Owens at Madison Square Garden Friday night to become the new United States champion as WWE pulled the trigger on a rare title change at a live event.
Styles’ surprising win over Owens harkens back to Kevin Nash’s (a.k.a. Diesel) monumental victory over Bob Backlund in 1995. The win would launch Nash into super stardom just before the Attitude Era.
And while title changes at non-televised events are certainly rare, they have become a tad more frequent during the new era. This trend has especially hit NXT, which on a smaller scale, is arguably WWE’s hottest live touring brand.
Samoa Joe kickstarted the trend last year with a stunning victory over Finn Balor, ending Balor’s 292-day run as NXT champion. WWE used the out-of-nowhere title flip to promote an upcoming NXT broadcast on the WWE Network set to rear the match. Joe would later drop the NXT title during a live event in Osaka, Japan to hometown hero Shinsuke Nakamura.
A continued pattern of newsworthy events at live shows will stimulate WWE’s live event business, namely on the SmackDown side where there was a recent report of low attendance during a SmackDown Live television taping in Dayton, Ohio.
Through 91 events, WWE’s live attendance in North America during the first quarter of 2017 averaged 6,000 attendees. While this represented an increase from Q4 2016, it was also a three-year low for the quarter.
By occasionally adding an “anything can happen” feel to live events, which are traditionally thought of as exhibitions, WWE can improve upon those numbers in future quarters as television viewership continues to see year-to-year declines.
Featuring Brock Lesnar, who squashed Owens at a live event in Madison Square Garden earlier this year and is scheduled to face Baron Corbin for the Universal Championship, will also bolster WWE’s live touring business.
Styles’ victory may have more to do with WWE’s reverence for Madison Square Garden, home to many iconic moments both on and off television. But guerrilla title changes of this nature will create must-read breaking stories across social media—a hook to potentially reach younger viewers—all while adding excitement and energy to WWE’s product as a whole.