George Barrios says there was a time when even Vince McMahon thought WWE’s top business minds had completely lost it.
Speaking on the POST Wrestling podcast, the former WWE executive recalled the moment he and Michelle Wilson laid out their vision for WWE’s future. This wasn’t a plan to squeeze out a little more revenue or sell a few extra tickets.
They believed WWE could completely reinvent itself.Instead of operating like a wrestling company built around events, they wanted WWE to become a nonstop content machine feeding television, streaming, social media, digital platforms and direct-to-consumer products. It was a massive swing.
“We probably spent 12 months doing a ton of work looking around the world, really kind of dissecting, which by the way nobody had really done anywhere, kind of both the media and entertainment, kind of what was happening and obviously a lot of change was coming. We knew that and how we would play in that. And look, it just unlocked this kind of entirely, you know, an entire complete pivot in the company to this, you know, not just event-based business, but a content factory, right? We’re not just going to be creating 300 hours of event content. We’re going to create thousands of hours of content around all the IP that we had, multiple platforms, social, digital, direct-to-consumer.”
The plan sounded ambitious enough that even Vince McMahon wasn’t immediately buying it. According to Barrios, they were talking about numbers that sounded insane at the time.
“He’s an optimistic guy. And there’s nobody more optimistic about WWE than him, but the stuff we were talking about then, you know, we said, ‘Hey, we can double, maybe triple, right? The revenue of this company and 10x the profit and 10x the value.’ That I think he thought at first he’s like, ‘What, you know, these guys are a little bit crazy.’ But then I think as he saw then us executing and it happening, you know, more and more trust built.”
Barrios said the biggest thing WWE figured out was that it didn’t need people to call wrestling a sport. It just needed them to watch. For years, critics kept repeating the same argument. Wrestling isn’t sports. Barrios says WWE’s response was simple.
“And by the way, our view of the world was, and nobody believed it, this was the great unlock, this thing is the value in the chain is live. It’s not sports. Everybody goes to sports. Yes, sports is valuable, but sports is valuable cuz it’s live, multigenerational, global, passionate viewership.”
“Hey, guess what? And I heard this for 3 years, ‘Wrestling’s not sports.’ And I said, ‘I don’t give a f**.’ It’s all those other things, and that’s what drives the value. And we ended up being right. Everybody else was wrong, and we ended up being right.”*
Looking at where WWE ended up, it’s hard to say they were wrong.
What do you think about Vince McMahon initially believing Barrios and Wilson’s vision for WWE sounded crazy? Let us know in the comments and share your feedback below.
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