CEO Wants “More Sami Zayns” from WWE, Tommaso Ciampa Injury Update

– Tommaso Ciampa suffered an ankle injury at the WWE NXT live event before “Takeover: Chicago” last week. PWInsider reports that Ciampa suffered another injury during the Takeover Ladder Match against NXT Tag Team Champions The Authors of Pain, which will require surgery. Ciampa appeared on crutches at Thursday’s NXT TV tapings and vowed to be the most dangerous man in pro wrestling when he’s able to return. No word yet on when he will be back but we’ll keep you updated.

– OSN CEO Martin Stewart recently spoke with CPI Financial to discuss WWE’s new “Wal3ooha” show in the Middle East. Stewart commented on how the new show came about:

“We’ve been the home of WWE in the region for many years, but when I started last year in OSN, one of the things that I felt was missing was localized aspects to our content. We are of this region, we are from this region, all of our customers are in this region, and we need to produce content that’s is relevant for them. WWE is incredibly popular right across the Middle East, but it needed an Arabic language program to really give voice to the fans to allow them to really get to the heart of the action. That’s what this show is going to do—it will allow people to live and breathe WWE 24/7, and to be in charge of what happens on the show on a weekly basis through the social interaction they’ll have through the hosts.”

Stewart also commented on if he could see a localized wrestling program with or without WWE, saying he would like to see more Arab WWE Superstars, more “Sami Zayns” on TV. He said:

“We’ll have to see how things develop. The first step that I think that we’ve taken together is to have the tryouts in Dubai. We were very vocal with WWE to bring them here to do the tryouts because we need to see more Arab superstars—more Sami Zayns. That’s important to us. The tryouts have gone very well and we will be following the progress of all the people that get selected as they go through the development programme and hopefully live on OSN on NXT, Raw, Smackdown or even Wrestlemania. We’ll follow their story, and that will hopefully be the first of many initiatives to make sure we have as much of a WWE presence in the middle east as possible.”