Professional wrestling used to be about entertainment innovation and thrilling promotions, but these days at WWE it’s all about stock buybacks and margin expansion.
Last year was World Wrestling Entertainment Inc.’s biggest ever for revenue and profit , but wrestler Shane “Slapjack” Thorne was worrying about something more pressing: His next paycheck.
“It has the surface look of cleaning up the books for a sale,” Scott D’Amore, executive vice president of Impact Wrestling, a rival wrestling circuit, told MarketWatch. “Those are certainly the moves you would make.” Wrestlemania, the industry’s equivalent of the Super Bowl that took place in Arlington, Texas, last weekend, was a testament to a wheezing product and stagnant story lines. Steve Austin, 57, who had not wrestled in 19 years, brawled with Kevin Owens in Saturday’s main event. “Jackass” star Johnny Knoxville knocked heads with Sami Zayn in an “anything goes” match. Social media personality Logan Paul teamed with The Miz to beat the Mysterios.
To the outside observer, it would appear McMahon — who created the modern-day national wrestling promotion — is milking a legacy business. Through a front-loaded TV deal and ongoing cutbacks, WWE was able to squeeze out a banner 2021 financial year despite a decline in virtually every other metric . Wall Street analysts still expect WWE to grow revenue and profit roughly 15% apiece in 2022 on average, despite the record-breaking performance of 2021, according to FactSet.
Along the way, Donald Trump was a frequent participant in story lines and the WWF was renamed WWE. Eventually, McMahon’s wife, Linda, herself a former WWE executive, served as head of the Small Business Administration under President Trump from 2017 to 2019. WWE is also producing two scripted shows, its first stab at TV fiction, including a drama series, “Pinned,” about a family that runs a wrestling company, for Comcast’s NBCUniversal, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“All these TV deals were a boon for the company, while the pay-per-views have become secondary,” Johnson, the writer for PWInsider, said. On the flip side, there has been gradually diminishing TV ratings and diluted content at monthly non-TV events. “As I read it, there is no immediate plan to sell the business,” Brandon Ross, an analyst at LightShed Partners, told MarketWatch. “It is Vince’s show. Pun intended.”
The rise of AEW Atrophy began to slowly set in at the then-World Wrestling Federation, Alvarez and others contend, with the death of rival WCW, a one-time ratings juggernaut, in 2001. [WWF purchased WCW’s name, logo and videotape library for $4.2 million. WWF changed its name to WWE in 2002 after the company lost a lawsuit filed by the World Wildlife Fund over the WWF trademark.
Khan, the son of Jaguars owner, billionaire Shahid Khan, is also general manager of English soccer team Fulham F.C. and owner of TruMedia Networks. To be sure, WWE remains TV king with an audience consistently 50% larger than that of AEW, and its holdovers are fiercely invested in the product. “Put it this way, World War III could break out and WWE fans would only care if Smackdown was pre-empted,” Alvarez said.
“WWE has ruled the business, and Vince has won. He is the only successful wrestling promoter in history, but what happens after that?” said Corgan, who is applying many of the same principles that made his band The Smashing Pumpkins successful to the wrestling biz. These include long-form storytelling and finding an audience that exists.
The constant drumbeat of WWE cuts, however, created fear and insecurity, she added. “That was heavy. We’re on the road as much as we are with our families,” Soho said. “When you lose them, it’s hard. That weighed a lot on people. This journey can end at any time.”
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