WWE Announces Clash In Paris PLE for August (WWE News)

WWE continues its international PLE tour by heading back to France this summer.

WWE Clash in Paris
WWE

Following a year in which WWE held a record two-thirds of its PLEs outside the United States, the company announced Wednesday that it will return to France this summer with a new PLE.

Clash in Paris will emanate from Paris La Défense Arena on Sunday, August 31, the first time the French capital has hosted a PLE. The arena also will be home to Raw the following night. This marks WWE's second France-based PLE, with last year's Backlash France taking place in Lyon.

While the seating configuration for the show hasn't been released, Paris La Défense Arena boasts a capacity of 40,000 for concerts and 32,000 for rugby games. It's billed as "the largest indoor venue in Europe" according to WWE and has hosted concerts by popular artists such as Taylor Swift, The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen. The venue also features an indoor screen that takes up an entire side of the arena, which could make for a really fun, interest setup for WWE if they incorporate it into the staging area.

Backlash France was WWE's first post-WrestleMania 40 PLE, which traditionally is a muted show deemed unimportant by critics and fans. However, the company hit on something in 2023 by holding Backlash that year in Puerto Rico. Those two iterations of Backlash away from the continental United States were defined by overwhelming crowd reactions.

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Similarly, Clash in Paris is slated to occur four weeks after SummerSlam, arguably WWE's second-biggest PLE of the year. Clearly, the company is counting on a hot crowd in a new locale to juice the event and make it feel bigger and more significant than the PLE normally would appear.

WWE indicated that it would share ticket sale dates and broadcast details in the near future.

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Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.