Why WWE Will Use Wembley Stadium In 2020
WWE haven't killed the towns in the United Kingdom, but they've landed a fair few significant blows. All tickets were automatically upgraded on the most recent tours, Raw didn't sell out and SmackDown photos resembled some of the horror shows at home. It had to have been unsettling for the company, not least as they prepared to move from their TV homebase, terminating a near-30 year relationship in the process.
Sky Sports were presumably f*cking livid when, one month after locking the company in for a five-year deal in 2014, the WWE Network launched and bantered off every Box Office purchase ever again. For those that may not be familiar, the company charged UK punters between £15-20 (around $18-25) for the monthlies whilst Raw, SmackDown and the rest came as part of a monthly subscription service. It wasn't cheap to watch all of the shows, but Sky's reach was such that they could justify squeezing the money out of those that were willing to invest in it.
The tenner-a-month Network deal was suddenly a no-brainer in Great Britain (when the f*cking thing actually launched), and Sky's Box Office buys were binned. As too was the deal when it expired. The approximate 22.9m Sky Sports subscribers will now have to join BT Sport's substantially smaller 6.6m peak. Both figures are perpetually changeable and mean less than ever with YouTube offering global audiences first-run clips hours after broadcast, but Vince McMahon will no longer have the first-run reach he once commanded.
AEW, meanwhile, have gone in the opposite direction. They have no Network or obvious streaming option for UK viewers as yet, meaning premium pay-per-views are currently the only option. If they can convince even a small percentage of the 66.04m in the UK that potentially have access to the weekly show on terrestrial channel ITV4, they'll pop numbers bigger than WWE in their pomp. And they too, would fancy finding 80,000 people willing to book a night in London to watch their show.
2020, without WWE making changes to old habits, could ironically change everything. The company have potentially had red carpet offerings from Wembley Stadium for years before now - they may have to walk it and talk i sooner rather than later before Tony Khan and co pull the rug out from under them.