AEW's Malakai Black Explains His Biggest Frustration With WWE's Booking

AEW star Malakai Black, formerly known as Aleister Black from his five years spent in the WWE, recently spoke with Metal Injection's Squared Circle Pit podcast regarding his WWE tenure, his love of heavy metal and his newfound home in All Elite Wrestling. While Black still speaks very highly of WWE for the time he spent there, he hasn't hesitated in discussing his frustrations with how the company operates. One of the issues he brought up in the interview was WWE's habit of 50/50 booking, allowing each wrestler to pick up a win over the other via repeatedly booking rematches.

"(Joining AEW) was the immediate thought process," Black said (h/t Wrestling Inc.) "I was sick of it, even before everything went down. I loved my time in NXT, but I felt I did nothing of importance on the main roster. It was too much bipolar 50-50 booking, they would push me and pull me off TV."

"Honestly, that's (50-50 booking) the entire product right now," he added. "There's nothing really consistent. Everything changes week to week, or is done to the point of beating it to death."

Black was a guest on Renee Paquette's Oral Sessions last month where he broke down one of the most frustrating aspects of modern WWE — seeing numerous popular NXT stars flounder on the main roster. And even though he was an NXT Champion, not even Black could avoid that trend.

"I think one of the main issues is that there [are] too many cooks in the kitchen," Black said. "Whereas Hunter [Triple H] has a vision and oversees the entire vision with his team. He always puts his ear to the ground and he communicates very one-on-one with his talent and everybody shares his vision. Where I feel the main roster a lot of people think that they know Vince's [McMahon's] vision, they haven't closely followed the people that are being brought up. Vince sees individuals and is completely mesmerized by them. And then when he has them he's like, 'All right, where do I place you?' I feel the time spent with 'where do I place you?' kind of loses it because it taking too long for people to be placed. Whether that's because the rotation is too quick or people don't have a creative vision coming in or people rely too much on letting the main roster do your creative work for you, who knows?

"I think it's a combination of both, I don't believe in one party always being the complete blame for everything," he continued. "When you come in you're a professional, you need to have a vision for yourself. You need to have a vision, you need to have ideas continuously. Even when you're not empty-handed, it just sometimes doesn't always translate the way that you want it to translate. Or it doesn't go with the vision that you want it to go. Because at the end of the day there's one man in charge of the vision, and if that vision doesn't pan out the way that it should pan out it's hard to stay afloat."