WWE’s war with AEW may be about a hell of a lot more than ratings, ticket sales and bragging rights. Dave Meltzer believes one of the biggest reasons WWE is fighting Tony Khan’s company so aggressively is simple — AEW gives wrestlers somewhere else to go, and that forces WWE to keep paying talent more money.
Speaking on Wrestling Observer Radio while discussing TKO’s latest financial numbers, Meltzer pointed out that WWE is operating with enormous profit margins even while wrestler salaries continue climbing. In his view, AEW has become one of the biggest reasons WWE talent has gained more negotiating power.
Meltzer said WWE is not dealing with the same kind of personal attachment Vince McMahon had to the company. TKO’s priority is making as much money as possible, and weakening AEW would potentially give WWE far more control over talent costs.
“They’re there completely to extract as much profit as they can from it, period. And I think that’s one of the reasons they’re fighting AEW so hard, is so that they can get back that control that they thought that they were going to have, and then they don’t have to be escalating salaries anymore and they’d have even bigger profits.”
Meltzer believes WWE is even willing to sacrifice money in the short term if it means putting pressure on AEW. He pointed to WWE running a six-hour event in Edinburgh, Texas, on August 30 as an example of what he sees as a loss-leader strategy aimed at taking attention away from AEW during a critical stretch.
“That’s their loss-leader mentality. It’s like, yeah, we’ll take some short-term money losses, but if we can get rid of them, if somehow we get rid of them as far as being major competition to us, maybe we can start asking guys to take pay cuts because they don’t have the leverage of going somewhere else.”
That leverage is the key part of Meltzer’s argument. He said WWE main-roster talent is making far more money than wrestlers ever expected in previous generations, and he credited AEW with helping drive those salaries higher.
“The ones that we see on TV on Raw and SmackDown, the ones on the main roster, they’re all doing great, far, far, far beyond their dreams of what they ever thought they would make in pro wrestling, partially because revenues increased and more so because AEW exists and it’s raised everyone’s salary.”
Even with those raises, Meltzer still believes WWE wrestlers and UFC fighters are underpaid compared to the amount of money TKO generates.
“I never hear from wrestlers complaining about their money. I hear from fighters complaining about their money constantly. But they’re both underpaid and at around the same level. I think, realistically, both should make triple what they make.”
Meltzer didn’t just throw out the “triple” figure either. He said he ran the numbers himself and believes WWE and UFC could increase talent compensation by three times its current level and both businesses would still make huge profits.
“I actually ran some numbers, and it’s like if they got paid triple what they made now, both companies would be super profitable. Super profitable. Not nearly to the extent they are, but they would be.”
That makes AEW’s role in the wrestling business bigger than television competition alone. As long as Tony Khan can offer WWE talent another legitimate place to work for major money, WWE has less freedom to dictate the market. Meltzer’s argument is that taking away that leverage would allow TKO to push talent costs back down while making an already massive profit margin even bigger.
Whether WWE can actually weaken AEW enough to change the talent market remains another question entirely. For now, AEW’s existence means wrestlers have another bidder at the table, and that may be worth far more to WWE talent than any television ratings battle between the two companies.
Do you think WWE’s aggressive competition with AEW is really about controlling wrestler salaries, or is Meltzer reading too much into TKO’s strategy? Let us know what you think in the comments.
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