How Pro Wrestling Works: A Beginner's Guide

If you've only ever seen a clip of someone being thrown off a ladder, pro wrestling can look baffling from the outside. It's a sport, a soap opera and a stunt show at the same time, and once you know how the pieces fit together it becomes one of the easiest things in entertainment to get hooked on. This guide covers the basics.

Is it real?

Pro wrestling is scripted athletic theatre. The people who run the company decide in advance who wins, and the performers work together in the ring to tell a story. What isn't fake is the athleticism and the risk: the falls, strikes and aerial moves are carried out by real people, and injuries are common and sometimes serious.

Fans call the old habit of presenting wrestling as a genuine contest "kayfabe". Today most promotions are open about the fact that it's entertainment, and much of the enjoyment is in appreciating how well a story is told, the way you might admire a good stunt sequence or a well-staged play.

Promotions, brands and shows

A promotion is a wrestling company: WWE, AEW, NJPW and TNA are examples, and each has its own roster, championships and style. Some promotions split their roster into brands, each with its own weekly show. WWE, for instance, runs Raw, SmackDown and NXT as separate shows with separate casts.

There are two kinds of show to know about. Weekly television shows tell the ongoing stories and usually run for two or three hours. Premium live events (often still called pay-per-views) are the big occasions where those stories are settled. Our guide to premium live events explains how the two fit together, and the weekly TV schedule shows what's on this week.

Faces and heels

Almost every wrestling story is built on a simple split. A face (short for "babyface") is the hero the crowd is meant to cheer; a heel is the villain they're meant to boo. A good heel makes you want to see them beaten, and a good face makes you want to see them win.

The split isn't permanent. A "heel turn" is when a face betrays the fans' trust and becomes a villain, and a "face turn" is the reverse. Some of the most talked-about moments in wrestling history are turns. Lucha libre uses its own words for the same idea: técnicos and rudos.

Storylines, feuds and builds

Behind the scenes, writers and bookers plan the shows. A feud is a rivalry between wrestlers or teams that plays out over weeks or months. Each week's television advances the story through matches and through promos, the microphone segments where wrestlers talk to the crowd and to each other. The feud then pays off, usually in a match at a premium live event. The weeks leading up to it are called the build.

Matches don't have to be rivalries. Plenty of bouts are simply the best wrestlers in the company showing off, and championship matches carry their own stakes. But knowing there's a story underneath is what makes a crowd erupt when a long-awaited moment finally arrives.

What happens in a match

The wrestlers cooperate to make the match look and feel like a contest. They agree the shape of the match in advance and often call the details to each other as they go, with the referee passing on timing from the production team. "Selling" is how a wrestler reacts to being hurt, and it's a large part of what makes a match believable.

Most matches end in one of a few ways:

• Pinfall: one wrestler holds the other's shoulders on the mat for a three-count.
• Submission: a wrestler is trapped in a hold and taps out or verbally gives up.
• Count-out: a wrestler stays out of the ring for longer than the referee's ten-count.
• Disqualification: a wrestler breaks the rules, for example by using a weapon the match doesn't allow.

Many special stipulations change these rules. See match types explained for ladders, cages, rumbles and more.

Championships

Titles give the sport structure. A champion defends the belt against challengers, and the championship picture is often the backbone of a promotion's storytelling. Reigns can last days or years. Our guide to how championships work explains lineages, reigns and vacated titles, and the Champions page lists who holds what right now.

Where to start

• Pick one weekly show from one promotion and watch it for a month. Stories make more sense when you follow them week to week.
• Watch a premium live event, where the biggest stories reach their conclusion. The events page lists what's coming.
• Read the glossary when a term trips you up; wrestling has a lot of jargon.
• Use Wrestl to keep up: the Headlines page gathers the day's news, the Rate page lets you score what you watched and see how everyone else saw it.