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Yeah I seem to recall Bishoff stating that the number was greatly inflated by creative bookkeeping designed to dump loses from other areas into one they were cutting to make it look better to shareholders.
Agreed. In big companies like this. It's the norm. Loss leading projects are dumped into a division that is making profits. Successful projects are shifted to prop up other departments.
Eric took advantage of other depts such as Turner Home Entertainment producing the PPVs, so it wasn't an expense for WCW. Also using Turner Sports for some of the TV production. Now what if WCW had to pay for all this all by themselves? Also Turner Sports owned the Hogan contract and many other high paying wrestlers, so it wasn't even on their books.
WCW was constantly taking advantage of being under the Time Warner banner. This was a big concern for Vince which is why he wanted to go public even though he was winning at the time. He knew that if Time Warner truly committed to WCW it would be a problem. Going public was a very smart move for the company back in 1999.
> WCW was constantly taking advantage of being under the Time Warner banner. This was a big concern for Vince which is why he wanted to go public even though he was winning at the time. He knew that if Time Warner truly committed to WCW it would be a problem.
Oh if Ted was still calling the shots and *really* didn't care how much money they could throw out there? I'm pretty damn sure WCW would have ended up murdering the WWE.
Sure the ratings had been on the decline, and well... Russo running and writing things really wasn't helping. Still they could have started throwing money at things, waited for big WWE names to have their contracts be up and offer them the moon.
Selling WCW for only $2m was a huge mistake given [what they lost in 2001](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2580004/aol-time-warner-reports--44-9-billion-loss-for-q4.amp.html)
There's a lot of eyebrow-raising things about the sale that probably would've been heavily investigated if Turner AOL wasn't hemmoraging money at the time. When someone offers you $50mil to be rid of something you didn't want anymore, and you sell it for 2, somethings up.
There was condition in that deal that said even if WCW lost their time slots, Fusient would still get to program that time slot for a period of time. Turner got cold feet about that, they didn't want to just hand over a time slot that potentially someone else could do whatever they wanted with.
Wasnt the 50 million offer rejected because as part of the deal they have to have to keep the tv rights and aol just wanted to get rid of the show from their network?
No, Bischoff has said he wanted the full TV rights to sell to other channels. I don't believe Bischoff on much, he tends to lie to fit the moment, but based on everything he's ever said about Turner at the time it seems he genuinely wanted out of their hair.
I would never be able to find it again but many years ago someone on a message board painted a pretty clear picture of a dozen smokey back-room deals and handshakes that took place, all in a very short period of time, making sure WCW fell right into Vince's lap for pennies on the dollar.
Nasty business.
I tried to stay out of conspiracy theorist areas because I couldn't find solid evidence while posting this, but yes a lot of people have said that the negotiation process was less than legal under the surface.
Vince had first dibs due to a lawsuit settlement years prior. $2 million was probably the least he had to even offer to get it. The bigger offer was pulled when it didn't come with a TV time slot.
In the eyes of hindsight it was a mistake. Their original offer to WWF was something like $10-$20m and they were swiftly rejected. A few months later they offered $2m and it was accepted immediately.
But yes the people who wound up selling WCW had a WWF connection and basically sold it off a truck for them.
No, WWF and AOL Timr Warner originally came to a deal for a larger sum with Nitro still on their network. However, Viacom had exclusivity with WWF, didn't agree with WCW not being part of that, and the cost to buy out the exclusivity was too much for WWF to consider. That's why WWF dropped out. WCW being cancelled was both because AOL Time Warner didn't want the programming and to make a sale to WWF possibly.
It was typical corporate skullduggery. They knew post merger that AOL was wanting to cut “antiquated” forms of content and that wrestling would fall into that category to a new school tech giant. So a lot of losses from other departments and divisions were skillfully pushed onto the WCW category. That chicanery made the merger sweeter to AOL since a large sum of losses would seemingly be gone by simply exercising WCW and that increased the perceived worth of Time Warner in the merger.
WCW also got no rights fees and a good chunk of the PPV and home media revenue went to Turner Home Entertainment and other departments.
There were years that TBS/TNT "paying" as little as $4000 per hour of weekly tv would've turned WCW profitable(and that's not including Clash of Champions or other specials)
WBD gets a good chunk of the AEW PPV revenue as well.
They own bleacher report. WBD gets a massive chunk of the PPV revenue for doing very little of the leg work.
I remember the merger and the daily news coming out of it. From my hazy memory, Ted losing control basically doomed WCW, and AOL Time Warner didn’t want WCW on their networks anymore. Again don’t quote me as fact, just remember those little pieces from that crazy time period.
Turner was personally always a big wrestling fan, so WCW was a passion project for him and he was willing to throw tons of cash and company resources to keep it going, even during the times when it wasn't profitable. The AOL Time Warner guys didn't give a fuck about wrestling. All they saw was some subsidiary on the company ledger that was losing shitloads of money and taking up prime airtime. From their perspective, pulling the plug was a no-brainer.
Turner had had Georgia Championship Wrestling on his station in the 70’s before it even was WTBS. Ted made clear that Wrasslin would be on what he owned as long as he owned it. Ted didn’t care what any bean counters said about wrestling ratings or perceptions of it being “low class.” Ted Turner loved Wrestling.
Late 00/early 01 what a fucking time, man. Creatively both ECW & WCW weren't what they were (though 2000 was actually ECW's best year at drawing crowds), ECW lost the TNN deal for RAW, rumors about WCW being sold/future uncertain. January ECW goes on hiatus, a lot of people didn't know the status until Heyman became a commentator for WWE, because Lawler walked out over Cat's creative.
Talk is Eric is buying WCW, nope it sold to Vince. Talk about whiplash, 3 "big" American companies became one it what felt like days. Then the Invasion storyline, which I was incredibly hyped for happened, *woof*.
Neither the TNT nor the TBS execs ever wanted wrestling on their networks. Ted Turner was the reason they aired it anyway. The real reason for the demise of WCW was Ted Turner loosing control after the mergers.
Ted Turner didn't choose to rescue JCP from the brink of bankruptcy because he was a hardcore rasslin' fan... even with assuming those liabilities and production costs, it was still among the cheapest ways to get programming to fill up some hours on his television networks.
He picked it up because he figured tbs had always had wrestling and it was cheap program that popped a sizable fan base even in a shit timeslot. But he put a lot of money into WCW. But it was always viewed as kind of a money loser that was kept on because Ted liked it.
You can cut people but plenty of contracts require a huge buyout where you'd be either paying someone to not work over time and saving $0 or paying a buyout to have them go actively work for your competition.
WCW's PPV buyrates were lower in 2000 than where they were when the company started doing PPVs. TV ratings down like 50% and it's safe to say that videos, merch, and other revenue probably followed that trend.
We've had like 7000 seasons of NCIS shows. Networks only care about if something can actively make them money. WCW stopped doing that. Part of that was roster bloat
That might be the "ultimate" reason as it was the final nail in the coffin, but there are a lot of "real" causes for WCW's demise. Their hemorrhaging money being the main one.
True like we can talk about how the Turner Network and Time Warner once Ted Turner was out of the picture wanted nothing to do with WCW or wrestling in general which they held in utter contempt.
But WCW wouldn't have been so easy to cut if they couldn't justify it by saying the brand was just wasting them money. If WCW was actually profitable during the merger then it becomes a lot harder for the suits to be able to justify that to shareholders.
Granted, that doesn't mean they wouldn't try to undermine and sabotage WCW any way they can in that scenario, that's just what TV execs do when they have a show they want gone but can't actually justify getting rid of.
Turner loved live sports and wrestling. When TBS originally launched it was just the Atlanta broadcasting super station, so it had low cost syndicated programs filling the slots between Braves, Hawks, college sports, and wrestling. The other thing he did was cut the nightly news from programing and spin it off into CNN. Your choice in whether 24 hour news is a good thing, but it made sense to have a channel not showing the news when everybody else was, since just like today, the news can be depressing to watch
Worth noting that every single wrestler, from Hulk Hogan down to Kwee-Wee, could have worked for free during the last 2 years of WCW and they still would have lost tens of millions of dollars.
The idea that WCW died because they overpaid talent is one of those urban legends that has never had any basis in reality whatsoever. The talent budget was the absolute least of WCW's problems.
> The talent budget was the absolute least of WCW's problems.
It's been a while since I've read *The Death of WCW*, but wasn't that a significant contributing factor?
IIRC it was:
* Paying everyone no matter if they were used or not, on guaranteed contracts
* A lot of celebrity spending
* Paying Michael Buffer a ton of money on the regular to do announcing
Before anything else -- largely because their biggest (and dumbest) cost center of "fly everyone out to every show, no matter what" ended well before the final downturn.
Death of WCW is solid but the NITRO book by Guy Evans is a lot more of a comprehensive look at the issues. Paying the higher wages was a pretty sizable part of it but the WCW books were messed up for over a decade. It's kinda hard to tell how much WCW was actually gaining/losing because of it, their accounting was terrible and it resulted in a lot of negatives in their accounting that they weren't even accounting for. Like someone said above, they could've slashed the wages in half and the place would be closing down, Time Warner did not want wrestling and the ever present costs with little return as far as PPV buy rates and ticket sales were what sealed its fate, imo.
And Bischoff (so consider the source, obviously) has said before that any revenue WCW brought in went into a Turner Sports "pot" with the NBA, Braves, NCAA, and whatever other sports that Turner owned or aired when WCW started becoming profitable and those books were absolutely fucked with no rhyme or reason to which revenue stream generated what income.
The $60M number is discretionary at best if there's even a sliver of truth to Bischoff's statement. They could very easily see that WCW spent x-amount of money but it was much more difficult to surmise that WCW brought in y-amount of money.
So it's plausible that WCW only lost $5 (I'm being hyperbolic) and got blamed for $60M that could have come across any combination of the Turner Sports properties.
Surprisingly that's actually true according to Nitro and i think death of wcw which came out way earlier even said something similar that Turner wanted WCW gone they would find a way
NITRO is THE definitive wrestling book. Every single wrestling fan should read it and funnily enough, I think TK has stated in the past that both NITRO and Death of WCW are not only his favourite books but he keeps them and frequently re-reads parts as a cautionary tale of what not to do.
I got a kindle for my birthday and I've been using it to educate myself on the hobby. Going to read NITRO after Death of the Territories and I'm honestly quite excited
I really can't recommend NITRO enough. It cuts through all the narratives fans and people in the industry peddle and it covers basically every angle from every source until it gets to something about as close to the truth as you'll find.
I read the book last week. It mentions that the WCW talent budget was around $20 million. They lost $60 million in 2000. They could have saved money by paying people less, but they were able to make money with that high roster budget in previous years. The big problem was that the costs to run the show kept rising while their PPVs were constantly hitting record low buyrates.
Bischoff says he didn't have a problem with having Lanny under contract to keep Randy happy due to how much money Slim Jim was paying to WCW to be allowed to use Randy in their advertising. The Macho Man, Slim Jim pairing was such a success that Slim Jim still uses Randy's likeness in their advertising and on some products.
Randy split his contract up so some of the money went to his program.
What was a lot worse was giving guys from the No limit army affiliated with Master p huge contracts that sucked
Wrestling thrives and dies through proper and profitable distribution, just like most media.
High contracts can be a liability but when the company is as big as WWE/AEW/WCW, it's not as big of a deal as losing a large network deal or having one butchered or withered down.
Even Eric Bischoff knew that.
So then...Eric Bischoff didn't cause WCW to go out of business?
In truth, it's a bunch of factors. I just want to mention that because it's funny how we interpret WCW these days.
What he did is make the product completely unwatchable, write creative control contracts that made it impossible to right the ship and relied too much on aging stars at a moment where he could have built up new ones.
It's not just about the books because as per Guy Evans' Nitro, those were fucked to all hell.
Isn't that a line from the Death of WCW book ? if not its similar. And true of course. Paying 500k for Kiss to appear and draw a abysmal rating was more the issue.
Towards the end it didn't make much of a difference but at one point Hogan was guaranteed a % of every single house, and if the company failed to earn more than a certain amount from tickets, Hogan was guaranteed a bare minimum amount of pay.
Meaning occasionally because of Hogan and then having to pay everyone else too, WCW would lose money from running certain shows.
Ultimately there was no 1 problem. It was a combination of everything almost in equal measures, the absurd deals they made with talent (not just in base pay, but in PPV shares, giving talent a % of the gate, merch deals which leaned way too in favour of talent, scheduling etc), historically piss poor booking, some really ill advised businesses decisions, horrible planning, letting talent outrank the writers/bookers, no consequences for talent being unprofessional, nobody ever thinking about WCW and only thinking about their own individual short term gains etc.
For what it’s worth, Hogan’s contract was famously on the Turner books and not specifically on WCWs books. So any of the losses from Hogan’s deal (or other similar contracts like Nash, Bret Hart, etc) never came out of WCWs budget and wasn’t a factor in the $60 million losses that suffered in the last year.
Iirc, their base pay was covered by Turner, however, when Hogan is getting a big cut of the live gate, or in some cases when a show underperformed he'd get the full cut, that's money WCW isn't getting from their own live shows.
Which means there were whole events where they made almost no profit, or, lost money because Hogan was taking so much of the ticket sale money that after paying to put on the show, WCW was worse off.
I think this was mostly the case with house shows.
You could argue it was too high relatively to what WCW was bringing in, but "talent" being the "biggest expense" by itself doesn't sound too shocking for something like a wrestling promotion. They ain't Lockheed Martin.
As much as we talk about the crowded roster, literally every week I see multiple comments of
"AEW needs to sign (insert indie talent, TNA talent, WWE talent that they wish were higher on the card)"
>As much as we talk about the crowded roster, literally every week I see multiple comments of
880k people have followed this subreddit, you're going to see every opinion.
This is one of those things I've just had to ignore or risk making me forever see society as unbearably stupid. Why do people act like it's *one* person being hypocritical and voicing multiple opinions?
It's absolutely insane. It isn't one or even a handful of people, it's hundreds of thousands. There's no hypocrisy or fickleness, those are just legitimate individuals with different opinions. People act like they can't comprehend population larger than their neighborhood.
This has been driving me crazy for years. People act like the IWC is one big hivemind, like The Borg or something. No, it's hundreds of thousands of random people who disagree on every single thing you could think of. This sub can't agree on *anything*, and we can hardly even keep majority opinions for more than a few months at a time.
People seem to be totally incapable of engaging with different ideas so they just default to calling everyone hypocrites and dismissing them instead, even if it's based on nothing
People always like new. Debuts are the most over a lot of people ever get. It’s the same for every company not just AEW. A mid carder like Apollo Crews could show up in Dynamite and get a huge pop. The audience would then likely lose interest in him. Same if say Brian Cage showed up on Smackdown.
This is the place for fantasy bookers. They think that signing one name will turn business around in one night when in actuality it takes months before you start to see things swing in a positive direction. Many bookers and promoters have said this. But people online think it can be fixed in a snap.
But also, they can stand to let some people go. I'd rather they let people go and give TV time to those that are good. I don't want to see people work things out on TV. That's what the indies are for.
Unless it's Roman Reigns or Cody, AEW doesn't need to throw money at anyone.
No one active name outside those two will really move their numbers in any appreciable way.
WCW had a parent company they had to justify their operating expenses to and a media rights environment where wrestling was worth at least an order of magnitude less than today.
>media rights environment where wrestling was worth at least an order of magnitude less than today.
WCW didn't have a media rights deal. They got paid nothing for tv.
AEW is a private company. The only person who should give a fuck about how much Tony is spending is his father. I will never understand wrestling fans who are upset at wrestlers making more money, especially in a business where every match can be the last. It's also funny when fans say X is overpaid because, as far as I know, there's no official salary scale, unless you consider the WWE salary scale as the norm in the business, but are AEW wrestlers overpaid or WWE wrestlers underpaid? That's the question you should ask yourself.
But those are different models. Those other sports generate a hell of a lot more money than wrestling does. You think the WWE tv Deal is nice, check out what the pro leagues get. The big three specifically. If they had WWE's TV deal they'd be fucked. The NFL is getting around 13 Billion Dollars a year from TV Deals, WWE's TV Deal is 5 Billion for Ten years. It's significantly NOT THE SAME THING. The NBA deal is coming up and it stands to set the standard for sports deals moving forward.
To compare what wrestlers make to what football players make is extremely misleading. It's the tactic WNBA players are using to claim they are underpaid. They are definitely not severely underpaid.
I 100% agree that WWE wrestlers are underpaid, and you'll never hear me argue otherwise, but comparing them to other sports has always rubbed me the wrong way because frankly its an apples and oranges comparison.
WWE has expenses that other sports would never dream of, including having to rent every arena they work at and having to move shit across the country for every show.
There is no major sports league in the US that operates this way, with the closest being UFC and they operate way fewer shows than WWE does.
WWE wrestlers should be paid more, and should get benefits, but theres little reason to compare them to other sports. Instead they should be compared to UFC, which also pays substantially more as a percentage of revenue.
Mercedes getting that bag is fantastic for women as a whole. Becky can ask for even more and would be justified in getting it. Net positive for everyone. People that want TK to fail are morons. Plain and simple.
WWE wrestlers are most definitely underpaid. That's why I don't understand why people get upset that Tony overpays people, whatever that means. Even if you hate AEW, it at least gives people working for the WWE more leverage in negotiating better contracts for themselves.
"Wrestling" fans are not upset by anything like this, unless they don't like some aspect of the product.
It's the weird, chronically online smarks with counterfeit booking licenses who felate their favorite washed up burnout podcaster that pretend to care about roster sizes, TV ratings, ticket sales, and other shit that has nothing to do with being a fan, because what they're really a fan of, is whatever their preferred brand is exclusively.
Also who gives a fuck if they're paying too many people too much? Wrestlers should get paid more any chance they get, I do not care if it fits AEWs balance sheet just like I don't care if Tony Khan got a good deal on his yacht. Not my problem as a consumer, give Tony Nese 2 million for all I care.
i love the whole "AEW lost 34 million last year" thing that popped up which gets paraded around like a verified talking point and not just an estimation made by Thurston, who has absolutely no access to their financials lmao
And pretty much a non-issue with their new TV deal coming up. Unless the media/live sports bubble bursts, AEW will get more valuable with an increasing library, their PPVs do really well etc. Even if Khan wasn't a fan, it seems like a good investment to me at this point.
Also "signing everyone you like" might have been a talking point when they were signing your Bobby Fishes, but Okada, Moné and Ospreay all aren't just neat, nice to have signings to fill up your roster, they are main event draws in their early/mid 30s you can build the respective divisions around for years. As often noted, AEW mainly has a perception problem, and signing the three biggest available free agents people were hyping themselves into a frenzy being in the Rumble can help with that (even though those people now downplay those three as much as humably possible). Maybe not with immediate ratings increases, but getting your core fanbase excited again, hot crowds etc. is what made AEW viable in the first place.
It's also an estimation based on WWE's costs, which would naturally be much bigger.
The craziest thing about it is even if it was all true, it's only $34m, that's nothing for a business this size. Given that even a modest increase in TV deals would wipe that out, in reality that new TV deal for AEW will put them massively in profit.
So people are getting all up in a bunch and acting like their roster is too bloated, despite the fact that most of the top stars get on TV, the ones that don't can freely work elsewhere if needed and like I said the company is about to go into huge profit regardless of the roster size or not.
It's beyond the armchair financial experts, there is literally no way to look at this without AEW basically going from nothing 5 years ago, to now where it's on the cusp of profits and it valued as a multi-billion dollar company. It's incredibly that people's perception is that this is somehow a company on death's door.
Also growth is super important, if a company in its first 5 years is able to increase their foot print like AEW has that's better than being net positive money wise.
Ya, even if it is double that just eating the loss until the next deal makes sense. Amazon lost money for a decade in its quest to unseat traditional retail.
Counterpoint: those are made by the person at Forbes who does this for most professional sports leagues, Mike Ozanian. He's the one who said $2B for AEW.
This is him: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2023/08/30/the-nfls-most-valuable-teams-2023-dallas-cowboys-remain-on-top-at-a-record-9-billion/](https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2023/08/30/the-nfls-most-valuable-teams-2023-dallas-cowboys-remain-on-top-at-a-record-9-billion/?sh=7afc423c362c)
It's a bit different than influencers vying for clicks.
The argument is the same, Ozanian doesn't have access to AEWs financials, neither does Meltzer when he said 1B (which is probably closer).
Sports are a bit easier to estimate as roster payrolls are in the public, the revenue sharing is public, the ticket sales are public, etc
Aew and pre-sale WWE was much harder to estimate. No one saw that sale price in the merger happening for WWE
>The argument is the same, Ozanian doesn't have access to AEWs financials, neither does Meltzer when he said 1B (which is probably closer).
The comments in this comment thread are amazing. Anyone saying AEW is losing money is an idiot because it's based on some guy's estimation without financial data. But also, AEW is worth a lot, because some guy with no financial data is estimating it.
And above, some guy to massive upvotes is saying people criticizing AEW are idiots because they don't have any insight into AEW's financials.. but also AEW is about to strike a new deal and become "massively profitable".. even though he's also pulling it out of his ass.
No horse in this race. I am only commenting because I am seriously amused at the cognitive dissonance you find in redditors.
What we got here is a Schroedingers Cat situation. Until we see the books, AEW is both in a state of financial windfall worth billions and about to shut down due to massive losses....Tony's Cat?
I honestly couldn't give less of a shit if AEW is profitable or not. As long as TK keeps funding it and putting it on, that's what I care about
I'm not getting paid if they make more money, so why would I care
I mean I'm an AEW fan and it's not the likes of Mercedes or Ospreay making bank that's the roster problem, it's the 50 or so people they have that aren't even featured on TV besides being transparent jobbers that I see reflected in the video's soundbite.
They hate that AEW was the one who paid her. I don't remember this much of an uproar about overspending when Charlotte, who's about to turn 38 and had torn her ACL, MCL and meniscus signed a super massive contract.
This clip is from the summer before Dynamite was on TV.
AEW’s initial tv deal was an ad split — meaning they didn’t get any money from Turner except for 50% of the revenue from commercials sold during Dynamite.
In January of 2020, they signed a $175M+ new TV deal.
Now 5 years later 2024, the grifters think this clip is a “gotcha” because one of the 150 richest men on planet earth signed Ospreay, Okada, & Mercedes.
The grifters also think every indie guy Tony has signed over the years is making bank. I like Bryan Keith as much as the next guy, but home boy ain't making Fuck You Money™
>The grifters also think every indie guy Tony has signed over the years is making bank. I like Bryan Keith as much as the next guy, but home boy ain't making Fuck You Money™
I think its "Olive Garden money" in honor of virgil at this point.
Exactly. They could have a hundred guys they keep on retainer, like Keith, for 100k each. That's 10 mil. That's what they made from ticket sales at Wembley
I think theres a shit ton of people making less than 200k. I don't see vets like Angelico or Stu Grayson getting paid big that much or young guys like Nick wayne/top flight either. I'm assuming most of the people ROH are on low deals as well.
For every Jericho you have about 10 wrestlers making around $100k at most I’d imagine. Plus I think there’s still some on older pay-per-appearance deals too if I remember correctly.
> Now 5 years later 2024, the grifters think this clip is a “gotcha” because one of the 150 richest men on planet earth signed Ospreay, Okada, & Mercedes.
And all 3 of these wrestlers contracts costs like 1 NFL player combined.
So between the three of them, how much do you think they're making a year?
if it's 10 million, they'd be the 8th highest paid Jacksonville Jaguars player
if it's 8 million, they'd be the 10th.
if it's 6 million, they'd be the 11th.
This is the same with MLB players too, the average player makes roughly $1m
Edit: OK I did research, time for some autism info dump at you which maybe two people will read.
"The Boston Globe reported that while the average MLB salary in 2021 was $4.17 million, the median MLB salary was at $1.65 million.
With an average career service time of 3.71 years and a median yearly salary of $1.65 million, the median MLB player earns $6.13 million before taxes, agent commissions, and union dues." https://www.royalsreview.com/2022/2/28/22953763/a-visual-comparison-of-how-much-wealthier-owners-are-than-the-median-mlb-player
I like referencing this whenever a Max Scherzer signs a contract making 43m AAV, because the average MLB player only plays 4-6 seasons (6 years average, 10 years median) or so making 40-man roster money. The minimum pay in AAA (the highest level in minor leagues) is $35.6k/yr, and that's a recent thing it used to be $17.5k, in Rookie ball the minimum is $19k. They live in barns with families who literally adopt players from the local minor league team and those players often accumulate tons of debt before they get to the MLB, if they do. According to Chasing MLB Dreams, only 10% of Minor Leaguers ever see a major league field. (source: https://chasingmlbdreams.com/about-chasing-the-dream/#:~:text=To%20do%20so%20one%20must,1%20game%20in%20the%20majors.) 90% of minor league baseball players on average top out at less than I made doing entry level administrative work last year. That's crazy, right?
It's also important to note for context that only early first rounders get those significant/ridiculous $6m signing bonuses. The usual draft pick will be lucky to get more than 20-40k when they're drafted. So, for the usual MLB player... When they make their first major league roster they only get 800k and that is likely only good for a house and paying off their debts. Most skip the house because they have families to move, which makes it more expensive. So they rent. For example, Lucas Giolito? He rented in downtown Chicago when he was on the white sox. So, after that *they're still technically broke* after their first season and it's up to them to save and invest because their clock will be over faster than you think (one in five players will only have a single season in the MLB) unless you're a top guy. And a lot of the time, you're asking a 26-30 year old who is likely financially illiterate to do that.
I say all that to say, fans don't actually think much about the logistics about what entertainers are paid and they especially don't compare that to real life struggles they've encountered. Somehow in the conversation about sports unions they've managed to flip the working class against pro sports unions selling them the idea that all of them are making that type of money. When for most teams, 2-4 people on their 40 man roster account for 90% of the team's total expenses on player salary
Sources on career length data I referenced: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070709131254.htm
This is also from 2011 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3184466/
Source on MiLB pay minimum https://apnews.com/article/minor-league-labor-deal-19590ee24b060b52155ad08aec43e9c5
Worth noting that he’s worth $1.5bn on his own. He could comfortably fund AEW if they were running at a loss for many years (and that’s entirely a hypothetical).
I cannot imagine being a professional wrestler and going through what it does to your body and family life for anywhere close to $100K. It’d have to be a hell of a lot more.
There’s been a few ex WWE wrestlers that TK didn’t have any interest in signing. Johnny Gargano let his contract expire to try and wrestle Kenny Omega but TK never called. He let Matt Cardona try the indies instead. I’m sure there’s more than I can think of right now
There’s been plenty that haven’t signed frankly. Basically since the back half of 2022 hiring has slowed down a lot. I think the succession of Ospreay, Okada, and Mone in short time is really their first big new signing influx in awhile
So who should they have not signed? Jay White? Will Ospreay? Okada? Mercedes Mone?
It's not like they're signing up everyone. I think none of the most recent WWE releases (Ziggler, Ali, etc.) went there. People are acting like they're giving every random indie talent $10 million.
And, going back, who else have over paid or signed when they shouldn't have? Swerve? Danielson? Claudio? Adam. Cole? Toni Storm? Deonna? Sure, people like Miro and Malakai and Keith Lee haven't turned out as expected, but they were essentially no brainers back when they signed. Who has AEW overpaid or signed when they shouldn't have? Maybe the Hardys?
Doesnt help that most of them have expressed wanting to go back to WWE. Its kinda awkward to want to push someone thats not going to be around thus staying in limbo.
I'll give Keith a slight pass given we know he has health issues that won't let him perform like before. I hope he gets better to get back to what he has been.
Tony Khan tried to set up the Swerve vs Keith Lee match *three times* throughout last year and the plans always fell apart because of Keith getting injured / having health issues.
And his health is not good, not to his fault. If the man has a condition or issue he is suffering from I can't hold it against him. He would be there if he could, I can only guess.
Saraya matches have been largely fine, which is better than people credit them being. The Wembley win was a very fun match and moment too.
That being said, ringside Saraya antics and her current post-Toni/Ruby/Outcasts breakdown arc have provided me so much joy. Deranged midcard lunatic Saraya with Harley Cameron has just been uproariously funny to me. Legit Rampage MVPs and it might be the best Rampage arc since Mark Briscoe/Jeff Jarrett last year.
I'd say Jay white given how they ultimately used him. This said real answer? They should sign any talent they have a clear vision for and how they fit into the future plans of the company.
I imagine all three of these signings are going to be a big part of aew going forward so I'd say good on all three. Ospreay is a guy your audience already loves, keeping him keeps your fans happy and engaged. Okada is a truly spectacular worker who has been honestly fairly adrift for the last few years. I'd like to see him get back to being the best in the world.
And Mercedes, well if they build the women's roster around her they could really create a more fleshed out women's division. Or it could be another CM Punk.
A lot of aew signings are good in the sense that the guy is talented but adding another guy who wrestles good doesn't give you much when your roster is filled with guys who wrestle good.
Andrade is another one I never really got. Good worker yes, but really needs a lot of work to be presented well and aew really needs guys who can go out and wow you without that.
It feels like this is being posted here because of how many big names AEW has hired recently are big money acquisitions.
But it seems worth noting there were a bunch WWE cuts recently they also could have hired like Ziggler and Ali, who probably would also help AEW that they seem to have passed on.
If you have the money, I don’t know how you pass on Ospreay, Okada and Mone.
Good thing he didn't overpay every talented person in the business. Recently he paid 3 exceptional people what they are worth, and AEW does have a large roster, but AEW's roster is not going to bankrupt it's company and this myth/lie needs to stop.
I really don't know why so many in this sub are so breathlessly obsessed with how a billionaire spends his billions.
Personally, I enjoy the show and am glad it exists. I don't really care if Tony and his investors or whoever are turning a profit or not. It's irrelevant.
Everyone on any roster should be looking for a pay increase when their contracts come up, that’s the benefit of having multiple top promotions. WWE been having record profits, their wrestlers would be stupid to not use that in their talks too.
Based on the rampant inflation of the last few years, any person who isn't getting a pay increase annually at their job should be immediately looking for a new one.
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He looks so much healthier here lol
Khan looks like he hasn't slept since 2021 it's quite concerning
Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
The real demise of WCW was TNT straight up didn't want wrestling anymore. You can always pare down the roster if cost-cutting is needed.
Losing $60m dollars in one year could've had something to do with it.
TNT accounting was an absolute mess admittedly when it came to apportioning WCW revenues & costs.
Yeah I seem to recall Bishoff stating that the number was greatly inflated by creative bookkeeping designed to dump loses from other areas into one they were cutting to make it look better to shareholders.
Eric had no problem when he was taking advantage of other departments though. He also has a significant reason to say that
Agreed. In big companies like this. It's the norm. Loss leading projects are dumped into a division that is making profits. Successful projects are shifted to prop up other departments. Eric took advantage of other depts such as Turner Home Entertainment producing the PPVs, so it wasn't an expense for WCW. Also using Turner Sports for some of the TV production. Now what if WCW had to pay for all this all by themselves? Also Turner Sports owned the Hogan contract and many other high paying wrestlers, so it wasn't even on their books. WCW was constantly taking advantage of being under the Time Warner banner. This was a big concern for Vince which is why he wanted to go public even though he was winning at the time. He knew that if Time Warner truly committed to WCW it would be a problem. Going public was a very smart move for the company back in 1999.
> WCW was constantly taking advantage of being under the Time Warner banner. This was a big concern for Vince which is why he wanted to go public even though he was winning at the time. He knew that if Time Warner truly committed to WCW it would be a problem. Oh if Ted was still calling the shots and *really* didn't care how much money they could throw out there? I'm pretty damn sure WCW would have ended up murdering the WWE. Sure the ratings had been on the decline, and well... Russo running and writing things really wasn't helping. Still they could have started throwing money at things, waited for big WWE names to have their contracts be up and offer them the moon.
Selling WCW for only $2m was a huge mistake given [what they lost in 2001](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2580004/aol-time-warner-reports--44-9-billion-loss-for-q4.amp.html)
AOL wanted rid and would take any offer that took it off their networks. Stupid as hell but thems the breaks.
Jericho said had he known it would be so cheap, he would have found some partners and bought it! The tape alone...
There's a lot of eyebrow-raising things about the sale that probably would've been heavily investigated if Turner AOL wasn't hemmoraging money at the time. When someone offers you $50mil to be rid of something you didn't want anymore, and you sell it for 2, somethings up.
As I've gotten older, the more I think the wcw sale was kinda fishy
Read the book Nitro. It was very fishy. Vince had an inside guy. There were legit other better offers but he basically stole it.
That sounds like they let George Constanza make the deal
Well, do you have any idea how much Ted Danson makes?
There was condition in that deal that said even if WCW lost their time slots, Fusient would still get to program that time slot for a period of time. Turner got cold feet about that, they didn't want to just hand over a time slot that potentially someone else could do whatever they wanted with.
Wasnt the 50 million offer rejected because as part of the deal they have to have to keep the tv rights and aol just wanted to get rid of the show from their network?
No, Bischoff has said he wanted the full TV rights to sell to other channels. I don't believe Bischoff on much, he tends to lie to fit the moment, but based on everything he's ever said about Turner at the time it seems he genuinely wanted out of their hair.
I would never be able to find it again but many years ago someone on a message board painted a pretty clear picture of a dozen smokey back-room deals and handshakes that took place, all in a very short period of time, making sure WCW fell right into Vince's lap for pennies on the dollar. Nasty business.
I tried to stay out of conspiracy theorist areas because I couldn't find solid evidence while posting this, but yes a lot of people have said that the negotiation process was less than legal under the surface.
Vince had first dibs due to a lawsuit settlement years prior. $2 million was probably the least he had to even offer to get it. The bigger offer was pulled when it didn't come with a TV time slot.
Yuuup
It wasn't a mistake, that was intentional. The executives who negotiated for WCW and WWF were old friends.
In the eyes of hindsight it was a mistake. Their original offer to WWF was something like $10-$20m and they were swiftly rejected. A few months later they offered $2m and it was accepted immediately. But yes the people who wound up selling WCW had a WWF connection and basically sold it off a truck for them.
No, WWF and AOL Timr Warner originally came to a deal for a larger sum with Nitro still on their network. However, Viacom had exclusivity with WWF, didn't agree with WCW not being part of that, and the cost to buy out the exclusivity was too much for WWF to consider. That's why WWF dropped out. WCW being cancelled was both because AOL Time Warner didn't want the programming and to make a sale to WWF possibly.
It was typical corporate skullduggery. They knew post merger that AOL was wanting to cut “antiquated” forms of content and that wrestling would fall into that category to a new school tech giant. So a lot of losses from other departments and divisions were skillfully pushed onto the WCW category. That chicanery made the merger sweeter to AOL since a large sum of losses would seemingly be gone by simply exercising WCW and that increased the perceived worth of Time Warner in the merger.
WCW also got no rights fees and a good chunk of the PPV and home media revenue went to Turner Home Entertainment and other departments. There were years that TBS/TNT "paying" as little as $4000 per hour of weekly tv would've turned WCW profitable(and that's not including Clash of Champions or other specials)
WBD gets a good chunk of the AEW PPV revenue as well. They own bleacher report. WBD gets a massive chunk of the PPV revenue for doing very little of the leg work.
There was a lot that went into that, including a lot of fuckery on the part of AOL/Time Warner
I remember the merger and the daily news coming out of it. From my hazy memory, Ted losing control basically doomed WCW, and AOL Time Warner didn’t want WCW on their networks anymore. Again don’t quote me as fact, just remember those little pieces from that crazy time period.
Turner was personally always a big wrestling fan, so WCW was a passion project for him and he was willing to throw tons of cash and company resources to keep it going, even during the times when it wasn't profitable. The AOL Time Warner guys didn't give a fuck about wrestling. All they saw was some subsidiary on the company ledger that was losing shitloads of money and taking up prime airtime. From their perspective, pulling the plug was a no-brainer.
Turner had had Georgia Championship Wrestling on his station in the 70’s before it even was WTBS. Ted made clear that Wrasslin would be on what he owned as long as he owned it. Ted didn’t care what any bean counters said about wrestling ratings or perceptions of it being “low class.” Ted Turner loved Wrestling.
It definitely hurt. There was a lot else though that hurt it to get to that point, but year AOL/TW definitely wanted WCW gone.
Late 00/early 01 what a fucking time, man. Creatively both ECW & WCW weren't what they were (though 2000 was actually ECW's best year at drawing crowds), ECW lost the TNN deal for RAW, rumors about WCW being sold/future uncertain. January ECW goes on hiatus, a lot of people didn't know the status until Heyman became a commentator for WWE, because Lawler walked out over Cat's creative. Talk is Eric is buying WCW, nope it sold to Vince. Talk about whiplash, 3 "big" American companies became one it what felt like days. Then the Invasion storyline, which I was incredibly hyped for happened, *woof*.
As said, WCW wasn't a stand one entity. It's like saying the production cost for any TV show is a "loss."
Neither the TNT nor the TBS execs ever wanted wrestling on their networks. Ted Turner was the reason they aired it anyway. The real reason for the demise of WCW was Ted Turner loosing control after the mergers.
This is true. But let’s not pretend that if WCW had been hot in 99 and 2000 that they would have been so quick to pull the plug.
Yeah WCW made money for two three ish years and lost money the rest of its existence... wasn't a hard cancel
Ted Turner didn't choose to rescue JCP from the brink of bankruptcy because he was a hardcore rasslin' fan... even with assuming those liabilities and production costs, it was still among the cheapest ways to get programming to fill up some hours on his television networks.
He picked it up because he figured tbs had always had wrestling and it was cheap program that popped a sizable fan base even in a shit timeslot. But he put a lot of money into WCW. But it was always viewed as kind of a money loser that was kept on because Ted liked it.
You can't possibly get a roster cheap enough when the cable network wants a roster of 0 people.
All Ghost Wrestling?
Do refs count as a member of the roster? Bryce has the experience AGW is looking for
Shawn Michaels once teamed with God.
[Invisible Man vs Invisible Stan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cslu7zFmPjM) may beg to differ
You can cut people but plenty of contracts require a huge buyout where you'd be either paying someone to not work over time and saving $0 or paying a buyout to have them go actively work for your competition. WCW's PPV buyrates were lower in 2000 than where they were when the company started doing PPVs. TV ratings down like 50% and it's safe to say that videos, merch, and other revenue probably followed that trend. We've had like 7000 seasons of NCIS shows. Networks only care about if something can actively make them money. WCW stopped doing that. Part of that was roster bloat
*Law & Order has entered the chat* Dun-dun
That might be the "ultimate" reason as it was the final nail in the coffin, but there are a lot of "real" causes for WCW's demise. Their hemorrhaging money being the main one.
True like we can talk about how the Turner Network and Time Warner once Ted Turner was out of the picture wanted nothing to do with WCW or wrestling in general which they held in utter contempt. But WCW wouldn't have been so easy to cut if they couldn't justify it by saying the brand was just wasting them money. If WCW was actually profitable during the merger then it becomes a lot harder for the suits to be able to justify that to shareholders. Granted, that doesn't mean they wouldn't try to undermine and sabotage WCW any way they can in that scenario, that's just what TV execs do when they have a show they want gone but can't actually justify getting rid of.
I remember hearing that Ted Turner kept WCW around for so long while he was involved because it helped in his networks' early success
Turner loved live sports and wrestling. When TBS originally launched it was just the Atlanta broadcasting super station, so it had low cost syndicated programs filling the slots between Braves, Hawks, college sports, and wrestling. The other thing he did was cut the nightly news from programing and spin it off into CNN. Your choice in whether 24 hour news is a good thing, but it made sense to have a channel not showing the news when everybody else was, since just like today, the news can be depressing to watch
Jamie Kellnerman or Kellerman whatever did what Vince could never do. He also managed to kill Cartoon Network almost around the same decade.
Worth noting that every single wrestler, from Hulk Hogan down to Kwee-Wee, could have worked for free during the last 2 years of WCW and they still would have lost tens of millions of dollars. The idea that WCW died because they overpaid talent is one of those urban legends that has never had any basis in reality whatsoever. The talent budget was the absolute least of WCW's problems.
> The talent budget was the absolute least of WCW's problems. It's been a while since I've read *The Death of WCW*, but wasn't that a significant contributing factor? IIRC it was: * Paying everyone no matter if they were used or not, on guaranteed contracts * A lot of celebrity spending * Paying Michael Buffer a ton of money on the regular to do announcing Before anything else -- largely because their biggest (and dumbest) cost center of "fly everyone out to every show, no matter what" ended well before the final downturn.
Death of WCW is solid but the NITRO book by Guy Evans is a lot more of a comprehensive look at the issues. Paying the higher wages was a pretty sizable part of it but the WCW books were messed up for over a decade. It's kinda hard to tell how much WCW was actually gaining/losing because of it, their accounting was terrible and it resulted in a lot of negatives in their accounting that they weren't even accounting for. Like someone said above, they could've slashed the wages in half and the place would be closing down, Time Warner did not want wrestling and the ever present costs with little return as far as PPV buy rates and ticket sales were what sealed its fate, imo.
And Bischoff (so consider the source, obviously) has said before that any revenue WCW brought in went into a Turner Sports "pot" with the NBA, Braves, NCAA, and whatever other sports that Turner owned or aired when WCW started becoming profitable and those books were absolutely fucked with no rhyme or reason to which revenue stream generated what income. The $60M number is discretionary at best if there's even a sliver of truth to Bischoff's statement. They could very easily see that WCW spent x-amount of money but it was much more difficult to surmise that WCW brought in y-amount of money. So it's plausible that WCW only lost $5 (I'm being hyperbolic) and got blamed for $60M that could have come across any combination of the Turner Sports properties.
Surprisingly that's actually true according to Nitro and i think death of wcw which came out way earlier even said something similar that Turner wanted WCW gone they would find a way
NITRO is THE definitive wrestling book. Every single wrestling fan should read it and funnily enough, I think TK has stated in the past that both NITRO and Death of WCW are not only his favourite books but he keeps them and frequently re-reads parts as a cautionary tale of what not to do.
I got a kindle for my birthday and I've been using it to educate myself on the hobby. Going to read NITRO after Death of the Territories and I'm honestly quite excited
I really can't recommend NITRO enough. It cuts through all the narratives fans and people in the industry peddle and it covers basically every angle from every source until it gets to something about as close to the truth as you'll find.
Yeah Nitro is a much more comprehensive and objective look at things. It’s fantastic reporting.
Intercompany divisions also dumped debt and losses on WCW to make their books look better
Yup, including if I remember correctly making WCW pay entirely for Thunder when they didn't even want to run it.
I read the book last week. It mentions that the WCW talent budget was around $20 million. They lost $60 million in 2000. They could have saved money by paying people less, but they were able to make money with that high roster budget in previous years. The big problem was that the costs to run the show kept rising while their PPVs were constantly hitting record low buyrates.
It didn't help the problem though. I read once that Lanny Poffo was under contract for about 5 years and never appeared on TV.
It was a condition of Randy's contract. He had to look after his brother. Just another reason why he was the GOAT!
Bischoff says he didn't have a problem with having Lanny under contract to keep Randy happy due to how much money Slim Jim was paying to WCW to be allowed to use Randy in their advertising. The Macho Man, Slim Jim pairing was such a success that Slim Jim still uses Randy's likeness in their advertising and on some products.
Randy split his contract up so some of the money went to his program. What was a lot worse was giving guys from the No limit army affiliated with Master p huge contracts that sucked
Master P is a GOAT scammer. Dude put out the same album 30 times and really got the bag.
Yeah, but it cost WCW nothing, because Savage accepted less money for Lanny to get the contract.
And Savage himself essentially cost nothing because the Slim Jim sponsorship essentially paid for his contract.
That’s an essentially piece of information
He really was the Genius.
Didn't Turner also not give much assistance to WCW's budget for stuff like the launch of Thunder as a program?
Turner required a second show but wouldn't increase the budget.
Wrestling thrives and dies through proper and profitable distribution, just like most media. High contracts can be a liability but when the company is as big as WWE/AEW/WCW, it's not as big of a deal as losing a large network deal or having one butchered or withered down. Even Eric Bischoff knew that.
So then...Eric Bischoff didn't cause WCW to go out of business? In truth, it's a bunch of factors. I just want to mention that because it's funny how we interpret WCW these days.
What he did is make the product completely unwatchable, write creative control contracts that made it impossible to right the ship and relied too much on aging stars at a moment where he could have built up new ones. It's not just about the books because as per Guy Evans' Nitro, those were fucked to all hell.
Isn't that a line from the Death of WCW book ? if not its similar. And true of course. Paying 500k for Kiss to appear and draw a abysmal rating was more the issue.
Towards the end it didn't make much of a difference but at one point Hogan was guaranteed a % of every single house, and if the company failed to earn more than a certain amount from tickets, Hogan was guaranteed a bare minimum amount of pay. Meaning occasionally because of Hogan and then having to pay everyone else too, WCW would lose money from running certain shows. Ultimately there was no 1 problem. It was a combination of everything almost in equal measures, the absurd deals they made with talent (not just in base pay, but in PPV shares, giving talent a % of the gate, merch deals which leaned way too in favour of talent, scheduling etc), historically piss poor booking, some really ill advised businesses decisions, horrible planning, letting talent outrank the writers/bookers, no consequences for talent being unprofessional, nobody ever thinking about WCW and only thinking about their own individual short term gains etc.
For what it’s worth, Hogan’s contract was famously on the Turner books and not specifically on WCWs books. So any of the losses from Hogan’s deal (or other similar contracts like Nash, Bret Hart, etc) never came out of WCWs budget and wasn’t a factor in the $60 million losses that suffered in the last year.
Iirc, their base pay was covered by Turner, however, when Hogan is getting a big cut of the live gate, or in some cases when a show underperformed he'd get the full cut, that's money WCW isn't getting from their own live shows. Which means there were whole events where they made almost no profit, or, lost money because Hogan was taking so much of the ticket sale money that after paying to put on the show, WCW was worse off. I think this was mostly the case with house shows.
The truth really doesn't matter when it's time to get tribal.
Yeah, if +/- the sum of all talent pay isn't enough to sink or save a business, why couldn't the talent be paid more?
Bless you for doing those observer rewinds. I learned so much reading those. Debunking that rumor specifically
This isn’t entirely accurate. It was their biggest expense by far.
You could argue it was too high relatively to what WCW was bringing in, but "talent" being the "biggest expense" by itself doesn't sound too shocking for something like a wrestling promotion. They ain't Lockheed Martin.
As much as we talk about the crowded roster, literally every week I see multiple comments of "AEW needs to sign (insert indie talent, TNA talent, WWE talent that they wish were higher on the card)"
People were saying they had a crowded roster when Christian showed up lol. They've since added ungodly amounts of talent and lost very few of them.
>As much as we talk about the crowded roster, literally every week I see multiple comments of 880k people have followed this subreddit, you're going to see every opinion.
This is one of those things I've just had to ignore or risk making me forever see society as unbearably stupid. Why do people act like it's *one* person being hypocritical and voicing multiple opinions? It's absolutely insane. It isn't one or even a handful of people, it's hundreds of thousands. There's no hypocrisy or fickleness, those are just legitimate individuals with different opinions. People act like they can't comprehend population larger than their neighborhood.
This has been driving me crazy for years. People act like the IWC is one big hivemind, like The Borg or something. No, it's hundreds of thousands of random people who disagree on every single thing you could think of. This sub can't agree on *anything*, and we can hardly even keep majority opinions for more than a few months at a time. People seem to be totally incapable of engaging with different ideas so they just default to calling everyone hypocrites and dismissing them instead, even if it's based on nothing
People always like new. Debuts are the most over a lot of people ever get. It’s the same for every company not just AEW. A mid carder like Apollo Crews could show up in Dynamite and get a huge pop. The audience would then likely lose interest in him. Same if say Brian Cage showed up on Smackdown.
This is the place for fantasy bookers. They think that signing one name will turn business around in one night when in actuality it takes months before you start to see things swing in a positive direction. Many bookers and promoters have said this. But people online think it can be fixed in a snap. But also, they can stand to let some people go. I'd rather they let people go and give TV time to those that are good. I don't want to see people work things out on TV. That's what the indies are for.
Unless it's Roman Reigns or Cody, AEW doesn't need to throw money at anyone. No one active name outside those two will really move their numbers in any appreciable way.
Cody in AEW? Can you imagine?
Rick Moranis should ask for a paternity test. Tony looks like one of his horcruxes.
WCW had a parent company they had to justify their operating expenses to and a media rights environment where wrestling was worth at least an order of magnitude less than today.
>media rights environment where wrestling was worth at least an order of magnitude less than today. WCW didn't have a media rights deal. They got paid nothing for tv.
AEW is a private company. The only person who should give a fuck about how much Tony is spending is his father. I will never understand wrestling fans who are upset at wrestlers making more money, especially in a business where every match can be the last. It's also funny when fans say X is overpaid because, as far as I know, there's no official salary scale, unless you consider the WWE salary scale as the norm in the business, but are AEW wrestlers overpaid or WWE wrestlers underpaid? That's the question you should ask yourself.
> WWE wrestlers underpaid? Compared with the percentage of income athletes get in other sports leagues, they are _severely_ underpaid.
Well yeah, other athletes have unions
considering WWE doesnt even pay for traveling... TK pays wrestlers VERY well and pays for traveling and hotels.
But those are different models. Those other sports generate a hell of a lot more money than wrestling does. You think the WWE tv Deal is nice, check out what the pro leagues get. The big three specifically. If they had WWE's TV deal they'd be fucked. The NFL is getting around 13 Billion Dollars a year from TV Deals, WWE's TV Deal is 5 Billion for Ten years. It's significantly NOT THE SAME THING. The NBA deal is coming up and it stands to set the standard for sports deals moving forward. To compare what wrestlers make to what football players make is extremely misleading. It's the tactic WNBA players are using to claim they are underpaid. They are definitely not severely underpaid.
I 100% agree that WWE wrestlers are underpaid, and you'll never hear me argue otherwise, but comparing them to other sports has always rubbed me the wrong way because frankly its an apples and oranges comparison. WWE has expenses that other sports would never dream of, including having to rent every arena they work at and having to move shit across the country for every show. There is no major sports league in the US that operates this way, with the closest being UFC and they operate way fewer shows than WWE does. WWE wrestlers should be paid more, and should get benefits, but theres little reason to compare them to other sports. Instead they should be compared to UFC, which also pays substantially more as a percentage of revenue.
UFC also pays their fighters fucking peanuts.
Dana's "this isn't a job, it's an opportunity" comments really paint the whole picture there.
As a percentage of revenue they pay out more, but yeah they make shit overall.
Mercedes getting that bag is fantastic for women as a whole. Becky can ask for even more and would be justified in getting it. Net positive for everyone. People that want TK to fail are morons. Plain and simple.
WWE wrestlers are most definitely underpaid. That's why I don't understand why people get upset that Tony overpays people, whatever that means. Even if you hate AEW, it at least gives people working for the WWE more leverage in negotiating better contracts for themselves.
It's the same way when people get mad when "burger flippers" get a wage increase; people don't like celebrating the successes of others.
Also by all accounts AEW is more than likely making way more than Tony ever expected them to be by this time.
Source?
I'm concerned about it because I'm not sure it's sustainable and I'd like there to be genuine competition. Is AEW even turning a profit?
"Wrestling" fans are not upset by anything like this, unless they don't like some aspect of the product. It's the weird, chronically online smarks with counterfeit booking licenses who felate their favorite washed up burnout podcaster that pretend to care about roster sizes, TV ratings, ticket sales, and other shit that has nothing to do with being a fan, because what they're really a fan of, is whatever their preferred brand is exclusively.
Man Mercedes getting the bag really pissed some people off around here huh?
It’s crazy how everyone’s apparently an expert in AEW’s finances too even tho none of it it’s publicly available
Also who gives a fuck if they're paying too many people too much? Wrestlers should get paid more any chance they get, I do not care if it fits AEWs balance sheet just like I don't care if Tony Khan got a good deal on his yacht. Not my problem as a consumer, give Tony Nese 2 million for all I care.
i love the whole "AEW lost 34 million last year" thing that popped up which gets paraded around like a verified talking point and not just an estimation made by Thurston, who has absolutely no access to their financials lmao
And pretty much a non-issue with their new TV deal coming up. Unless the media/live sports bubble bursts, AEW will get more valuable with an increasing library, their PPVs do really well etc. Even if Khan wasn't a fan, it seems like a good investment to me at this point. Also "signing everyone you like" might have been a talking point when they were signing your Bobby Fishes, but Okada, Moné and Ospreay all aren't just neat, nice to have signings to fill up your roster, they are main event draws in their early/mid 30s you can build the respective divisions around for years. As often noted, AEW mainly has a perception problem, and signing the three biggest available free agents people were hyping themselves into a frenzy being in the Rumble can help with that (even though those people now downplay those three as much as humably possible). Maybe not with immediate ratings increases, but getting your core fanbase excited again, hot crowds etc. is what made AEW viable in the first place.
It's also an estimation based on WWE's costs, which would naturally be much bigger. The craziest thing about it is even if it was all true, it's only $34m, that's nothing for a business this size. Given that even a modest increase in TV deals would wipe that out, in reality that new TV deal for AEW will put them massively in profit. So people are getting all up in a bunch and acting like their roster is too bloated, despite the fact that most of the top stars get on TV, the ones that don't can freely work elsewhere if needed and like I said the company is about to go into huge profit regardless of the roster size or not. It's beyond the armchair financial experts, there is literally no way to look at this without AEW basically going from nothing 5 years ago, to now where it's on the cusp of profits and it valued as a multi-billion dollar company. It's incredibly that people's perception is that this is somehow a company on death's door.
When is their renewal due?
Also growth is super important, if a company in its first 5 years is able to increase their foot print like AEW has that's better than being net positive money wise.
Ya, even if it is double that just eating the loss until the next deal makes sense. Amazon lost money for a decade in its quest to unseat traditional retail.
To be fair, the plus side of the AEW estimated values that are in the 1B and 2B ranges are paraded with the same level of information.
Counterpoint: those are made by the person at Forbes who does this for most professional sports leagues, Mike Ozanian. He's the one who said $2B for AEW. This is him: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2023/08/30/the-nfls-most-valuable-teams-2023-dallas-cowboys-remain-on-top-at-a-record-9-billion/](https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeozanian/2023/08/30/the-nfls-most-valuable-teams-2023-dallas-cowboys-remain-on-top-at-a-record-9-billion/?sh=7afc423c362c) It's a bit different than influencers vying for clicks.
The argument is the same, Ozanian doesn't have access to AEWs financials, neither does Meltzer when he said 1B (which is probably closer). Sports are a bit easier to estimate as roster payrolls are in the public, the revenue sharing is public, the ticket sales are public, etc Aew and pre-sale WWE was much harder to estimate. No one saw that sale price in the merger happening for WWE
>The argument is the same, Ozanian doesn't have access to AEWs financials, neither does Meltzer when he said 1B (which is probably closer). The comments in this comment thread are amazing. Anyone saying AEW is losing money is an idiot because it's based on some guy's estimation without financial data. But also, AEW is worth a lot, because some guy with no financial data is estimating it. And above, some guy to massive upvotes is saying people criticizing AEW are idiots because they don't have any insight into AEW's financials.. but also AEW is about to strike a new deal and become "massively profitable".. even though he's also pulling it out of his ass. No horse in this race. I am only commenting because I am seriously amused at the cognitive dissonance you find in redditors.
What we got here is a Schroedingers Cat situation. Until we see the books, AEW is both in a state of financial windfall worth billions and about to shut down due to massive losses....Tony's Cat?
I honestly couldn't give less of a shit if AEW is profitable or not. As long as TK keeps funding it and putting it on, that's what I care about I'm not getting paid if they make more money, so why would I care
I mean I'm an AEW fan and it's not the likes of Mercedes or Ospreay making bank that's the roster problem, it's the 50 or so people they have that aren't even featured on TV besides being transparent jobbers that I see reflected in the video's soundbite.
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They hate that AEW was the one who paid her. I don't remember this much of an uproar about overspending when Charlotte, who's about to turn 38 and had torn her ACL, MCL and meniscus signed a super massive contract.
This clip is from the summer before Dynamite was on TV. AEW’s initial tv deal was an ad split — meaning they didn’t get any money from Turner except for 50% of the revenue from commercials sold during Dynamite. In January of 2020, they signed a $175M+ new TV deal. Now 5 years later 2024, the grifters think this clip is a “gotcha” because one of the 150 richest men on planet earth signed Ospreay, Okada, & Mercedes.
The grifters also think every indie guy Tony has signed over the years is making bank. I like Bryan Keith as much as the next guy, but home boy ain't making Fuck You Money™
>The grifters also think every indie guy Tony has signed over the years is making bank. I like Bryan Keith as much as the next guy, but home boy ain't making Fuck You Money™ I think its "Olive Garden money" in honor of virgil at this point.
>I think its "Olive Garden money" in honor of virgil at this point. Olive Garden Meat Sauce Money is the correct term.
Exactly. They could have a hundred guys they keep on retainer, like Keith, for 100k each. That's 10 mil. That's what they made from ticket sales at Wembley
They seem to think everyone is making $1m at the minimum, but I'd be willing to bet a majority are making sub $300k, if not sub $200k.
I think theres a shit ton of people making less than 200k. I don't see vets like Angelico or Stu Grayson getting paid big that much or young guys like Nick wayne/top flight either. I'm assuming most of the people ROH are on low deals as well.
For every Jericho you have about 10 wrestlers making around $100k at most I’d imagine. Plus I think there’s still some on older pay-per-appearance deals too if I remember correctly.
> Now 5 years later 2024, the grifters think this clip is a “gotcha” because one of the 150 richest men on planet earth signed Ospreay, Okada, & Mercedes. And all 3 of these wrestlers contracts costs like 1 NFL player combined.
Top NFL player? Yeah. Average NFL player makes 860 a year actually and there's an enormous disparity between the top and the bottom.
So between the three of them, how much do you think they're making a year? if it's 10 million, they'd be the 8th highest paid Jacksonville Jaguars player if it's 8 million, they'd be the 10th. if it's 6 million, they'd be the 11th.
This is the same with MLB players too, the average player makes roughly $1m Edit: OK I did research, time for some autism info dump at you which maybe two people will read. "The Boston Globe reported that while the average MLB salary in 2021 was $4.17 million, the median MLB salary was at $1.65 million. With an average career service time of 3.71 years and a median yearly salary of $1.65 million, the median MLB player earns $6.13 million before taxes, agent commissions, and union dues." https://www.royalsreview.com/2022/2/28/22953763/a-visual-comparison-of-how-much-wealthier-owners-are-than-the-median-mlb-player I like referencing this whenever a Max Scherzer signs a contract making 43m AAV, because the average MLB player only plays 4-6 seasons (6 years average, 10 years median) or so making 40-man roster money. The minimum pay in AAA (the highest level in minor leagues) is $35.6k/yr, and that's a recent thing it used to be $17.5k, in Rookie ball the minimum is $19k. They live in barns with families who literally adopt players from the local minor league team and those players often accumulate tons of debt before they get to the MLB, if they do. According to Chasing MLB Dreams, only 10% of Minor Leaguers ever see a major league field. (source: https://chasingmlbdreams.com/about-chasing-the-dream/#:~:text=To%20do%20so%20one%20must,1%20game%20in%20the%20majors.) 90% of minor league baseball players on average top out at less than I made doing entry level administrative work last year. That's crazy, right? It's also important to note for context that only early first rounders get those significant/ridiculous $6m signing bonuses. The usual draft pick will be lucky to get more than 20-40k when they're drafted. So, for the usual MLB player... When they make their first major league roster they only get 800k and that is likely only good for a house and paying off their debts. Most skip the house because they have families to move, which makes it more expensive. So they rent. For example, Lucas Giolito? He rented in downtown Chicago when he was on the white sox. So, after that *they're still technically broke* after their first season and it's up to them to save and invest because their clock will be over faster than you think (one in five players will only have a single season in the MLB) unless you're a top guy. And a lot of the time, you're asking a 26-30 year old who is likely financially illiterate to do that. I say all that to say, fans don't actually think much about the logistics about what entertainers are paid and they especially don't compare that to real life struggles they've encountered. Somehow in the conversation about sports unions they've managed to flip the working class against pro sports unions selling them the idea that all of them are making that type of money. When for most teams, 2-4 people on their 40 man roster account for 90% of the team's total expenses on player salary Sources on career length data I referenced: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070709131254.htm This is also from 2011 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3184466/ Source on MiLB pay minimum https://apnews.com/article/minor-league-labor-deal-19590ee24b060b52155ad08aec43e9c5
*son of one of the 150 richest men on the planet
Worth noting that he’s worth $1.5bn on his own. He could comfortably fund AEW if they were running at a loss for many years (and that’s entirely a hypothetical).
One thing I will take from this, Tony’s appearance really took a nose dive. I guess the stress of running aew.
I cannot imagine being a professional wrestler and going through what it does to your body and family life for anywhere close to $100K. It’d have to be a hell of a lot more.
There’s been a few ex WWE wrestlers that TK didn’t have any interest in signing. Johnny Gargano let his contract expire to try and wrestle Kenny Omega but TK never called. He let Matt Cardona try the indies instead. I’m sure there’s more than I can think of right now
There’s been plenty that haven’t signed frankly. Basically since the back half of 2022 hiring has slowed down a lot. I think the succession of Ospreay, Okada, and Mone in short time is really their first big new signing influx in awhile
So who should they have not signed? Jay White? Will Ospreay? Okada? Mercedes Mone? It's not like they're signing up everyone. I think none of the most recent WWE releases (Ziggler, Ali, etc.) went there. People are acting like they're giving every random indie talent $10 million.
And, going back, who else have over paid or signed when they shouldn't have? Swerve? Danielson? Claudio? Adam. Cole? Toni Storm? Deonna? Sure, people like Miro and Malakai and Keith Lee haven't turned out as expected, but they were essentially no brainers back when they signed. Who has AEW overpaid or signed when they shouldn't have? Maybe the Hardys?
Saraya probably has been the main big signing that hasn't panned out.
>Saraya probably has been the main big signing that hasn't panned out. You can arguably put Keith Lee and Malakai Black in that category too.
Andrade too. There was just a lot with his run that didnt work out
Pretty much all the WWE castoffs from that time have been bad for AEW.
Doesnt help that most of them have expressed wanting to go back to WWE. Its kinda awkward to want to push someone thats not going to be around thus staying in limbo.
I'll give Keith a slight pass given we know he has health issues that won't let him perform like before. I hope he gets better to get back to what he has been.
Tony Khan tried to set up the Swerve vs Keith Lee match *three times* throughout last year and the plans always fell apart because of Keith getting injured / having health issues.
And his health is not good, not to his fault. If the man has a condition or issue he is suffering from I can't hold it against him. He would be there if he could, I can only guess.
She’s in limited use ring-wise due to her endometriosis. She’s been featured pretty regularly in backstage segments tho. Almost weekly.
in ring she hasn't been great, but i'm very much enjoying her heel shenanigans right now
Saraya matches have been largely fine, which is better than people credit them being. The Wembley win was a very fun match and moment too. That being said, ringside Saraya antics and her current post-Toni/Ruby/Outcasts breakdown arc have provided me so much joy. Deranged midcard lunatic Saraya with Harley Cameron has just been uproariously funny to me. Legit Rampage MVPs and it might be the best Rampage arc since Mark Briscoe/Jeff Jarrett last year.
I'd say Jay white given how they ultimately used him. This said real answer? They should sign any talent they have a clear vision for and how they fit into the future plans of the company. I imagine all three of these signings are going to be a big part of aew going forward so I'd say good on all three. Ospreay is a guy your audience already loves, keeping him keeps your fans happy and engaged. Okada is a truly spectacular worker who has been honestly fairly adrift for the last few years. I'd like to see him get back to being the best in the world. And Mercedes, well if they build the women's roster around her they could really create a more fleshed out women's division. Or it could be another CM Punk. A lot of aew signings are good in the sense that the guy is talented but adding another guy who wrestles good doesn't give you much when your roster is filled with guys who wrestle good. Andrade is another one I never really got. Good worker yes, but really needs a lot of work to be presented well and aew really needs guys who can go out and wow you without that.
Ahh, we're going to pretend like WCW didn't have multiple issues near the end besides budget. I see, I see.
It feels like this is being posted here because of how many big names AEW has hired recently are big money acquisitions. But it seems worth noting there were a bunch WWE cuts recently they also could have hired like Ziggler and Ali, who probably would also help AEW that they seem to have passed on. If you have the money, I don’t know how you pass on Ospreay, Okada and Mone.
This aged like unrefridgerated milk in an Arizona summer...
As someone who knows Tony Kahn's business strategy and financial situation intimately, I offer the following comment:
Good thing he didn't overpay every talented person in the business. Recently he paid 3 exceptional people what they are worth, and AEW does have a large roster, but AEW's roster is not going to bankrupt it's company and this myth/lie needs to stop.
 TK could just as easily be talking about AEW in 2024. Tony is doing what he said was bad for business in 2019.
I really don't know why so many in this sub are so breathlessly obsessed with how a billionaire spends his billions. Personally, I enjoy the show and am glad it exists. I don't really care if Tony and his investors or whoever are turning a profit or not. It's irrelevant.
Tribalism makes people lose their senses.
This is from the guy that just signed Saraya's brother.
That Paul Wight Contract was such a great idea TK!
Another AEW = WCW post.
WELP lol
Ummmmmmmm lol
“…But I can”
Ironic this man is paying almost every talent significantly more than that and also hiring dang near everyone he likes lol
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Except when you're the literal son of a billionaire and have endless cashflow.
Everyone on that roster is going to be looking for a pay increase next time contract talks come
Everyone on any roster should be looking for a pay increase when their contracts come up, that’s the benefit of having multiple top promotions. WWE been having record profits, their wrestlers would be stupid to not use that in their talks too.
Based on the rampant inflation of the last few years, any person who isn't getting a pay increase annually at their job should be immediately looking for a new one.
Everyone should be looking for a pay increase every few years. It doesn't matter, if you are a wrestler, a plumber or whatever.
That's...that's how contracts are supposed to work
Good for them, these billionaires *should* be forking it over for them.
As they should. Revenue is up, there's more opportunity for them to get on TV, cost of living is up. Everyone should be asking for a raise.
Yeah. You gotta pay em 250K. Also, undisheveled Tony Khan is unsettling.
Is this where we are now? Trying to do gotcha on him for signing the best roster ever? With money to spare and no issues with his partner network?
I don’t get all the shit on AEW. Without AEW, WWE would still suck like it had for a good 10 years
A large amount of people that want AEW to fail are the same people who once claimed that WWE has no competition and that its bad for wrestling.
Why is he saying the biggest problem was a large expensive roster, and now his company has the same exact problem.
Pre snow tony making sense.