10 Most Overpaid WWE Stars Of 2017
It's like that catchphrase Vince McMahon pretended he always said: It's all about the monnnaaaay.
Full disclosure - or not, as the case may be: WWE performer salaries are not made public, and those sources that claim to know about such matters usually possess the journalistic integrity of Piers Morgan, hawking newspapers with Fake Piss News.
"Forbe" it from me to doubt the credentials of certain institutions, but it's all something of a guessing game. The integrity of the mathematics is about as suspect as WWE's attendance numbers. Since WWE lies about those numbers for "entertainment purposes" - including fans, venue staff and talent alike - who's to say WWE wouldn't embellish salary information, even if it were made public?
Instead, we'll have to - in the absence of any real data - carry this out as an exercise of inference and deduction. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to determine that Brock Lesnar is on an absolute b*stard fortune, and your average homegrown NXT undercard recruit, like a Tye Dillinger, hasn't had much in the way of a tenure-driven increase.
We might cite the odd source, but we're by no means taking their exact word for it...
10. The Ascension
Konnor and Viktor must be laughing at this point, provided they don't have any aspirations of actually making it as stars. It's a strange path they've travelled; buried instantly upon their main roster promotion, they have settled into a weird groove as regular guest stars on a sketch comedy programme with just the one sketch.
They barely appear on SmackDown, which would necessitate wrestling different matches, even against the same opponents. Toiling exclusively on the house show circuit, aside from the odd TV multi-man in which they are passengers, the Ascension mustn't have to do much. The house show circuit being what it is, talents wrestle the exact same match for as long as they are programmed with the same opponent - and this is often the case for months on end. The exact same match is wrestled to avoid mental fatigue - and physical fatigue is avoided via phoned-in performances with an emphasis on comedic stalling and theatrics.
Like the vast majority of talents, we know for a near-enough fact that Konnor and Viktor command a six-figure salary, at least - with one source claiming the figure reaches $300,000 each.
Welcome to the wasteland, indeed.