WWE Struggling to Sell Battleground Tickets?

08/31/2017 04:25 pm EDT

If you're waiting to buy your WWE Battleground tickets, you may want to hold off a bit longer.

According to the Wrestling Observer newsletter, ticket sales for the Philadelphia show are not going well and in response, WWE is discounting most tickets by $20.

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This doesn't come off as too much of a surprise as SmackDown has had an unspoken flatness about it for several weeks now. Not that the show has been bad, it's just a much different program than RAW is currently.

Monday nights feature much more compelling stakes. The Roman Reigns/Braun Strowman storyline just graduated to the land of attempted murder. The Universal Champion, Brock Lesnar, is making regular appearances. And perhaps most of all, Samoa Joe is demanding to be recognized as a main eventer.

At SmackDown, things just don't feel as urgent. If anything some of the storylines are redundant. Rusev, Kevin Owens, and WWE Champion Jinder Mahal are all tapping into anti-American personas, sometimes even saying the exact same things.

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Mahal and Orton have the luxury of novelty with their feud heading into a Punjabi Prison, but fans don't seem too excited. Further, the climax of Kevin Owens vs. AJ Styles already happened at a house show, so what exactly would be our incentive for watching their PPV match? And for Rusev vs. John Cena, well, Eric Bischoff may have summed it up perfectly:

"What's a Flag Match?! What the hell is a Flag Match?! It's like it's been around for a thousand years and everybody knows what a Flag Match is. So, I am going to take your flag? Or, you're going to take my flag? I am sorry… do not care. Boring."

A Flag Match seems terribly out of touch, and a possible waste of John Cena's blockbuster ability. Toss in an arbitrary Women's Championship picture and we are nearing a pay-per-view that we may be better off not watching.

For most of 2017, SmackDown has been clearly the better show than RAW. However, with SummerSlam looming, it appears that WWE has hit the gas on RAW's creative and left SmackDown in the dust. This happened last year when SmackDown's biggest match at Summerslam was Dean Ambrose vs. Dolph Ziggler for the WWE Championship.

WWE still has time to build SmackDown going into SummerSlam but don't look for things to pick up until after Battleground.

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