How WWE Can Position The Club as Centerpiece of Its Tag Team Division

Cut the right path for The Club, and the faction will be the WWE's next dynasty.

Luke Gallows and Karl Anderson are on the verge of seizing the WWE Tag Team Championships after just two months with the company. Beyond winning those gold straps, though, the two bruisers have the aura, reputation and slugfest savvy to be the tag team division's bedrock.

If WWE wants to take advantage of this, the key will be portraying them as believable destroyers, keeping their dynamic intact and adding layers to their story.

Anderson and Gallows arrived in April, continuing the kinship they cultivated as part of New Japan Pro Wrestling. The two bullies thrived in Japan as part of the take-no-prisoners, ferocious stable The Bullet Club. They carried with them momentum from that run, something WWE clearly tried to build on by only changing their name slightly.

The Club is now one of three teams challenging The New Day for the tag titles at the Money in the Bank pay-per-view. 

It has a better shot than its peers, though. The Vaudevillains, for example, are in that same bout but haven't received the type of spotlight The Club has. Gallows and Anderson have been trading blows with WWE's biggest names, clobbering Roman Reigns and John Cena.

High-flying Superstar AJ Styles hesitated to join the men he once fought alongside in Japan at first but has since reunited with The Club, forming a reprisal of the NJPW faction.

Styles captaining the squad and The Club's marquee victims make it feel as if big things are ahead for the crew. To ensure that is the case, the first step is creating images of dominance.

Establish Alpha Status 

WWE fans have seen tough guys come and go, heard villains promise chaos and destruction only to fizzle out. The Wyatt Family has been underwhelming. The League of Nations lasted only briefly, leaving little impact before disbanding.

To separate The Club from groups like that, WWE has to leave the audience believing in the faction as an overwhelming force. Gallows' size and Anderson's smashmouth style make them a perfect fit for that role. 

To get there, they must attack low-ranking teams and leave them hurting. That means racking up wins and showing little weakness. While The Club has attacked its share of babyfaces, there is work to be done to have it come off as dominant.

The Club is 6-4-1 since joining WWE, per CageMatch.net. That's good—just not eye-catching.

WWE should mimic how it handled The Shield when it tore through the roster beginning in 2012. Seth Rollins, Dean Ambrose and Roman Reigns beat up legends like Undertaker, sent Ryback crashing through tables and won every fight in front of them for a long, long time.

One had to eventually buy in. It was clear that WWE was behind them. And seeing them leave behind so much ruin helped portray them as powerful beasts.

Repeating a similar stretch for The Club would be wise.

That can begin at Money in the Bank. Have Gallows and Anderson emerge from that four-team battle as the champs and leave a number of foes out cold in the process.

Then it's time to focus on a feud that former ECW star Tommy Dreamer is clearly excited about:

The Club vs. New Day at SummerSlam is a money match, one that could be used to catapult the heels. Have The Club outlast the champs, shaking the trio's confidence. 

Have Gallows and Anderson take down all comers next. Let them cause the kind of wreckage The Shield did. Interest in them is bound to pick up, with it becoming more and more difficult to imagine someone dethroning them.

Avoid Excess Expansion

The WWE version of The Club went from two to three members when Styles finally relented and joined his old NJPW teammates. There will be a temptation to keep that growth going. The Bullet Club, after all, has had upwards of 10 wrestlers in the group at a time.

But this is a new entity in a different environment.

Keeping the stable's enrollment smaller makes it easier to focus on everyone involved. It makes booking less complicated for WWE Creative.

Adding Finn Balor from NXT when WWE drafts for the Raw and SmackDown brands in July would make sense. The Club's past history with Balor adds intrigue. The former NXT champ was The Bullet Club head before Styles took over.

That gives WWE plenty of avenues and an interesting dynamic to explore.

And even with Balor around, there would still be plenty of spotlight left over for Gallows and Anderson. Ballooning the group beyond that point, however, would get tricky. The New World Order's WCW run in the late 1990s is a perfect example of that.

When it was just Kevin Nash, Hulk Hogan and Scott Hall who dressed in black, spray-painted their foes and ran roughshod over WCW, the NWO was the coolest thing in wrestling.

Eventually, just about everybody joined the team. Everyone from Virgil to Dennis Rodman donned the signature NWO T-shirt. The faction became diluted as a result.

That can't happen to The Club.

Leave it a tight-knit crew. Otherwise, all the faces start to blend together.

Narrative Depth

WWE has had the advantage of The Club coming in with a history, with subplots ready to go when it debuted.

The company has taken a wink-wink-nudge-nudge approach to the group, referring to its past, but only vaguely. There has been no explicit mention of NJPW. There has been no retelling of how Styles came to power with that stable.

Instead, The Club has been the sequel that doesn't explain what happened in the original.

While that's a good starting point, there has to be more to the faction's story than that. While not leaning too much on Gallows and Anderson's NJPW past, WWE has to answer two major questions.

Who is The Club? What does it want?

Build a new narrative atop the existing one. Diverge from the source material, if you will.

Styles' origin story has been made clear. He's a hard-working vagabond wrestler who has had success all over the world in other promotions. He's now looking to prove that he belongs on the WWE stage, looking to add championships from this company to his long resume.

To make Gallows and Anderson compelling enough to be the centerpiece of the tag division, that kind of storyline development needs to take place with them, too. Being Styles' friends from the past isn't enough.

That was enough to get fans to perk up their ears, but there are more layers to be built in order for The Club to become the team that the tag division revolves around.