WWE: The Fall Of An Empire

WWE is at very least delicately placed at present. Or, more specifically, its stock price is.

Investors will remain assured as long as investigations continue in earnest and the findings are thorough and just (in as much as such things can be), but how - if at all - does the family recover from this in the years to come?

Stephanie McMahon was lambasted by anonymous company insiders once she'd left her post in mid-2022, in something that resembled a night-of-the-long-knives stitch-up for the most senior of McMahon's juniors. Can somebody generating that amount of internal heat really stay the course in the hot seat? Nick Khan won't be with WWE forever but his lasting legacy is assured by the financial margins he'll leave behind - cleaning up at the last television rights negotiations and cleaning out the company until only a threadbare roster and fatally flawed developmental system remained has made everybody at WWE's top table, himself included, richer than ever. If the investigation into McMahon remains a risk to any of this, the former Chairman will be pushed as far away from his product as bigwigs can theoretically justify. Likewise John Laurinaitis or anybody else remotely near the historic non-disclosure agreements outlined in the Wall Street Journal report. Linda and Shane are out and if there was ever a chance of them making a return, 2022's various misadventures have surely put paid to that.

WWE's not been strictly a family business for a long long time, but most of the wrestling world considered it a megalomaniacal McMahon mom-and-pop shop all the same.

That it might need to transparently move as far away from that perception as possible to maintain its legacy and profitability is just the latest in a line of once-unthinkable developments. It would thus be foolish, if unprecedented, to assume that the family might not have to fall a little further before this scandal passes.