MR. TITO: Wrestlemania 42’s Weak Ticket Sales are an Indictment of TKO, NOT WWE Creative

Finally, we’ve officially hit the saturation point for these damn WWE ticket prices. During 2023, Endeavor purchased WWE and then combined it with their previously purchased UFC to form the TKO Corporation. As TKO assessed how WWE was significantly growing during 2023-2024 thanks to the peak years of the Bloodline, successful returns of Cody Rhodes and CM Punk, and the Rock igniting business for Wrestlemania 40, they realized that they had a product with growing or strong demand. Thus, through late 2024, they began ramping up ticket prices for WWE events. The majority of gripes towards the WWE during 2025 were about the ticket prices for live events and then eventually, selling PLEs to ESPN for double or triple what Peacock was charging along with selling Royal Rumble 2026 ($100 million) and Wrestlemania 43 ($250 million) to Saudi Arabia.

Wrestlemania 42 isn’t selling tickets at the rate of how Wrestlemania 41 sold them one year ago at the same venue. FACT. While around 45,000 tickets is still impressive for any live wrestling event, during this time last year, Wrestlemania 41 sold just over 50,000 tickets.

Both Wrestlemania 41 and 42 were held at Allegiant Stadium (home of the Raiders) in Las Vegas and can house up to 72,000 for larger events. Wrestlemania 41 was just over 60,000 for night 2 while being just over 58,000 for night 1. Again, while those numbers are great for any wrestling event, this is WRESTLEMANIA and Royal Rumble 2025 that preceded it at Indianapolis did just over 70,000 in attendance.

Wrestlemania 40, meanwhile, did just over 60,000 for both nights and thus Wrestlemania 41 drew less than that. And now, unless something changes, Wrestlemania 42 will decline below that.

In other words, it appears that maybe WWE peaked through 2024?

Well, imagine Wrestlemanias 41 and 42 without the extreme price gouging by the TKO machine.

According to Sports Illustrated, the average ticket price for Wrestlemania 40 in Philadelphia was $341. One year later, Wrestlemania 41 had an average ticket price of $635!

If I go to Ticketmaster.com right now, as Wrestlemania 42’s average ticket price will be computed later once sales are final, but everything is higher at every seating level for 2026 versus 2025 in the same Las Vegas stadium.

And that’s on top of the excessive price gouging that the city of Las Vegas has, whether it’s for landing at their airport, ride share costs, taxes on damn near everything, super high food prices, higher hotel rates (especially for bigger events), and fees on damn near everything. Total visitors, thanks to the higher prices, has declined by about 7.5% during 2025 versus the previous year.

Hence why Las Vegas was desperate and cut a check for a reported $6 million to the WWE to return to Las Vegas for a back-to-back Wrestlemania. WWE also gets a piece of the ticket prices and can sell their merchandise, too.

Through 2026, they are seeing yet another decline in attendance… For both 2025 and 2026 in Las Vegas, if they retained the average ticket prices seen in Philadelphia for Wrestlemania 40, they would have EASILY sold out both Wrestlemanias 41 and 42. Give your fans a break on the ticket prices and then the hotels, air travel, food, etc. don’t feel as excessive. Price gouge on the ticket prices, and then things change.

Simply put, this is economics 101… Law of Demand states that there is an inverse relationship between price and quantity demanded. Increase the price, you should expect consumers to buy less. Decrease the price and make things cheaper, consumers will buy more.

HOWEVER, there are outside factors that could BOOST the desire by consumers to spend more or less on goods and services, such as:

1) Tastes & Preferences – If you really like a good, then you’ll be willing to PAY MORE for a particular good of service. In my opinion, WWE Creative improving since Triple H took it over during June 2022 has improved wrestling fans’ desires to attend WWE event and consume MORE of their products even with rising prices.

2) Income – On average, incomes have increased since the pandemic year of 2020 by around 14%. However, many businesses closed up during 2020 and caused many to obtain new jobs. Furthermore, if you look at the average real disposable income, it’s highly skewed towards top wage earners who are raising that inequality gap. Many speak of a “K-Shaped Economy”, in which people at the top are doing really well while people at the bottom are struggling as witnessed by high credit card debit and exhausted savings. 2025’s economy struggled for that lower portion of the “K”, as only 181,000 combined jobs were created compared to 2024’s 1.5 million job creation number. Prices on utilities are eating people alive now (electricity and gas), while the costs of food and housing haven’t gone down at all.

3) Expectations – In other words, how good does your consumer base feel about (a) job security and (b) income security? According to consumer sentiment numbers, really low… December 2025 numbers are rolling in and it appears that consumers cutback on Christmas spending this year.

4) Prices of Related Goods – This refers to substitute goods, which can replace WWE as a wrestling product, or complement goods, which are used alongside with attending WWE events. First and foremost, the WWE is the #1 company by a margin and every statistical category proves that. Dave Meltzer can spike his stupid Observer awards with AEW wrestlers, but WWE crushes them on business each year with viewers, attendance, merchandise, and TV rights. Even with higher ticket prices, people aren’t attending AEW events with much lower ticket prices. FACT. But on the complement front, prices for hotels, food, and travel have all gone up or remain high especially for Las Vegas.

Market Size – # of Consumers – Thanks to the WWE’s business boom of 2022-2024, WWE has grown their fanbase. With more fans in place, there are more fans to exploit with higher prices than ever.

The FACT that wrestling fans STILL attend WWE events, despite the high prices, shows that TASTES AND PREFERENCES for the WWE product is still strong. Thus, the blame does NOT go to WWE Creative as led by Triple H. HHH is doing a great job, as he made the Bloodline better during 2022 thanks to adding Sami Zayn, made Cody Rhodes even bigger, swallowed his pride and brought back CM Punk, repackaged Drew McIntyre to have his best years yet, and proved that yes indeed, Liv Morgan is a massive star. RAW consistently obtains 10,000 fans, as it has returned to being WWE’s flagship show. And again, over 40,000 highly priced tickets sold for Wrestlemania 42 is still impressive and WWE is making millions off that event. AEW would KILL for any of their events to sell 40,000 tickets domestically at their lower prices.

Let’s be honest about Wrestlemania 42’s booking… Roman Reigns vs. CM Punk is truly their best match-up possible, aside from the Rock returning to finally wrestle Roman Reigns. Pushing Liv Morgan is the best outcome possible on the women’s side. Possibly having Brock Lesnar vs. Gunther is another big match, if that actually happens. Whomever Drew or Cody wrestle will be big… It’s not like WWE Creative is screwing up Wrestlemania 42, given what is available.

But at super high prices, fans have a saturation point to where it’s not worth getting price gouged by BOTH WWE and Las Vegas in one weekend.

As the Million Dollar Man used to say… “Everybody’s got a price”, but that works in the opposite way when someone is spending their hard-earned income. Wrestlemania 42 could feature hot women, walking around in the nude, and then stopping to blow you… And it still wouldn’t be worth $500 to $14,000 for a seat in Las Vegas plus travel, hotel, and other forms of price gouging.

Then we’ll get the Vince McMahon marks, who always look the other way when it comes to assaulting women and then having them sign non-disclosure agreements (NDA)… ”Vince wouldn’t charge high ticket prices!” Well, when he was micro-managing creative for the last 15 years through mid-2022, he didn’t have a product that actually grew fans. Those 2010s years, especially, were ROUGH to watch and saw RAW viewership going from just above 4 million during early 2015 to being under 2 million by the late 2010s. THAT was Vince McMahon and his clown show of rewriting scripts that got himself off.

Facts to consider about Vince McMahon:

(1) The first PLE event in Saudi Arabia was during April 2018, 5 years before the sale to TKO.

(2) WWE doesn’t go on sale if Vince didn’t force himself back onto the WWE Board of Directors during early 2023 plus adding 2 board members of his choice. Then, the WWE Board under Vince’s leadership began shopping around and sold to Endeavor. Vince, as majority shareholder, certainly helped the vote go in favor of selling.

(3) Vince McMahon became chairman of the TKO Board during 2023 and remained there through early 2024. Very likely that prices of WWE events and merchandise deals were among the discussions with the Endeavor folks also on that board.

(4) Helped negotiate the Netflix deal which pays the WWE $500 million annually. Success for them, but higher Netflix subscription rates for you. Higher deal with USA Networks, too, for WWE Smackdown which could be influencing your higher cable bills.

(5) Vince McMahon added Nick Khan to the WWE during August 2020, and he worked as a negotiator on behalf of the WWE before that year. Nick has been heavily involved in WWE’s pricing strategy.

I hope that puts to rest the “Vince wouldn’t have done this” argument, because he’s every bit as greedy as the folks running TKO. Anytime his WWE had growth periods during the 1980s with Hulkamania and later with the Attitude Era, ticket prices did go up significantly.

How about this? I wrote a column during 2014 about how WWE created the WWE Network because their Pay Per View model was dying. Why? Because they went from pricing WWE PPVs from $29.99 to $44.99, not including the Big 3 events. WWE killed their own PPV market by creating more PPVs and raising the price. That was during the mid to late 2000s and early 2010s. Who was in charge of WWE then? It was Vince McMahon. He only formed WWE Network BECAUSE HE HAD TO due to demand decline for buying Pay Per Views and piracy ramping up because of higher prices.

But when he had a chance to sell WWE Network, he did so immediately to NBC/Universal… From there, your $9.99 price started ticking up on the Peacock streaming network if you didn’t want commercials.

Oh, and how about this with the WWE? As Vince McMahon is landing these big TV deals with NBC Universal for both USA Network/Peacock and FOX while raking in the money from Saudi Arabia, what happened to the wrestlers? Did they get paid more? Nope… In fact, pay has plateaued after the initial AEW scare and many talent cuts happened during 2020-2022 while the WWE pocketed all of the revenues from these big deals.

So STOP IT with the “I want Vince McMahon” back crap. He was equally as greedy as the folks from TKO, but his Creative SUCKED from 2006-2021 and wasn’t able to price gouge like TKO now can with better creative in place under Triple H. Furthermore, why would you want Vince back? Are you OK with him having female employees or workers sign NDAs to participate in his sick games?

TKO is the problem, along with other greedy corporations. Tired of high grocery prices? Well, only a handful of corporations own the top grocery store chains. Kroger’s CEO literally admitted in court to price gouging and the only punishment they saw from it was being disallowed to acquire one of their competitors. We only have 3 cell phone companies now and they can price gouge all they want… Netflix trying to buy Warner Bros. for $83 billion. Do you think that won’t cause a price hike for both their streaming service and also at theaters? If Paramount/Skydance gets Warner Bros. for over $100 billion, which they are seriously offering, do you think that won’t cause higher prices for their content? Pharmaceuticals, banks, and other corporations are acquiring each other and taking out massive loans to do so. That all has a price and that will be passed on to you.

Notice how TKO is receiving higher than ever streaming revenue, $250 million from Saudi Arabia for Royal Rumble 2026 and Wrestlemania 43, payouts from United States cities, and sponsors on everything inside and outside of the ring… But yet, they cannot appreciate or show any loyalty to:

(a) Loyal WWE fans who helped support WWE before its 2022 growth rate

(b) Wrestlers who helped make WWE great. Severely underpaid, as it baffles me why they won’t unionize.

Do you know what the scary thing is?

“News insiders” are claiming that the WWE is “panicking” due to lower Wrestlemania 42 ticket sales. Are you kidding me?

WWE still has over 40,000 fans paid and at higher ticket prices, they are likely close to Wrestlemania 42’s financial gate already (especially if the 30% higher number is true). Furthermore, the $6 million check from Las Vegas to move away from New Orleans has already been cashed. Trust me, Vegas is happy with getting 40,000 people there and plugged into their hotels, casinos, and eateries. Lastly, no matter what the attendance is, WWE is earning $325 million per year to stream WWE PLEs on ESPN+.

Nick Khan, the Endeavor folks, and the rest of the TKO Board are high fiving right now.

If they wanted, they could let Saudi host all Wrestlemanias and Royal Rumbles moving forward. Hell, maybe they could sell them a piece of the company for several billion dollars.

The more CORPORATE you become, the more obsessed about pleasing ONLY the shareholders you become.

Folks, we’ve been on a 25+ year journey from when the WWE made their initial public offering (IPO) on October 19, 1999. On that day, the WWE became a publicly traded corporation with shares of stock officially selling on the stock market. With that, WWE now had to post their financial statements to the public and those are used to drum up support for investors to buy more of WWE’s stock. As WWE begins to warm up to pleasing shareholders on keeping profitability high (revenues up or stable, but expenses controlled or lowered), they began to attract other corporations. Remember when they returned to NBC/Universal? Comcast helped introduce the PG Era. Remember when Mattel helped Mandy Rose lose her job? And then selling to Endeavor during 2023 after the same company put their corporate fangs into UFC and ruined that sport.

TKO has only been here for about 3 years of that corporate WWE journey…

Go ahead, push Triple H out the door… Do you really expect that the corporate barons on the TKO board will adequately replace him? Do you really trust the same corporate trolls who are price gouging you on events, gouging you on merchandise through Fanatics, causing you to pay ESPN $29.99 per month, causing higher prices at Netflix, and selling their biggest PLEs to the largest bidder to put someone of quality in WWE Creative? NOPE, they’ll put in someone who will read TKO’s analytics and focus group data to do just enough to maximize profits.

Sure, bring Vince McMahon back, the guy who SOLD to Endeavor during 2023. He’ll cause those prices to go down against the same executive management who forced him out the door during 2024?

You’ve got to be kidding me.

Do you really want to put the SCREWS to TKO?

You’ve got to play the long-game, folks… What matters most to WWE and TKO are the TV rights deals.

(1) Don’t watch RAW on Netflix at all. Watch clips on YouTube or WWE’s social media account, which are LEGAL ways to view what happens. If you get the viewership so low, then Netflix may begin threatening to opt out early at 5 years from the 10-year deal.

(2) Don’t watch Smackdown on USA Network at all. Same thing, watch clips on YouTube or WWE’s social media about, both are LEGAL ways to view what happens. Smackdown deal is also up at the end of 5 years and lower viewership could impair WWE’s next deal.

(3) Sparingly watch ESPN+. If you’re a viewer of PLEs, maybe consider “doing without” for the non-big 3 events. Again, you can legally catch clips on YouTube or WWE’s social media accounts. If you need to watch Rumble or Wrestlemania, then just buy for January and April only. You could also take Stephanie McMahon’s advice and VPN your way into International Netflix…

(4) Boast on Social Media. Openly brag about how you’re NOT viewing WWE events on Social Media and hashtag WWE every time. They are monitoring this stuff closely and will panic if they see a massive trend. Make it known WHY you aren’t subscribing to services that air WWE television.

I’d suggest “don’t attend WWE events”, but WWE will ship more events overseas…

Things won’t change if you keep giving TKO your money, despite their desires to price gouge you or force you into being a customer of a price gouger like ESPN+.

Wrestlemania 42 ticket sales have sagged due to TKO’s greed at accepting a $6 million check from Las Vegas to move away from New Orleans and then TKO decided to raise prices significantly anyway. That’s what a greedy corporation does and they suck.

But I’ll argue that Triple H is doing his best with his current resources, creatively… My only issue with him is the same exact issue that I had with him during the 2010s: he struggles to sign and develop male main eventers. Kevin Owens, Gunther, and AJ Styles are his biggest success stories. Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins were FCW talents and signed by John Laurinaitis, and even Bron Breakker was a Jon Laurinaitis signing while HHH was gone from Talent Relations. The top WWE guys are getting long in the tooth and I lack faith in the younger crop to fully replace them.

If you’re asking me today what happens to Triple H… Some bad injury luck or retirements from the older roster will cause numbers to decline during 2027-2028, which could prompt the TKO board to pressure him to resign. When he does, I’d expect some Hollywood type, likely handpicked by the Rock, to take over and you’ll see a WWE go from SUCK to BLOW like never before. And then Triple H will get the last laugh because the current management will share the same problem of being unable to develop younger talent while there will be a major lacking of veteran talent to carry things through. Netflix will drop WWE by early 2030 and they’ll probably return back to the arms of NBC/Universal but at a lower price than what Netflix was paying them. And then, TKO cashes out and sells WWE and its properties to someone else or another company.

And then the WWE will be lost forever, thanks to becoming corporate.

In short, overall, I’ve enjoyed Triple H’s tenure since mid 2022. I’ll take his tenure at creative versus Vince’s micro-management of Creative from 2006-2021 and without the NDAs for mistreating women. Triple H has created a compelling WWE product that fans are actually willing to pay high prices for, though Wrestlemania 42 may prove to be the breaking point.

Greedy ass TKO can go to hell!

Mr. Tito Column Archive @ NoDQ