Wrestling News & Rumours Thread ***NO CHAT***

The WWE of today bears little resemblance to the WWE of a year and a half ago, when media executive Nick Khan joined as president and chief revenue officer.

Vince McMahon still controls the media and entertainment company out of Stamford, Conn., of course. McMahon’s daughter Stephanie, and Stephanie’s husband Paul “Triple H” Levesque, still have senior roles at the company as chief brand officer and executive vice president of global talent strategy and development, respectively.

“If it once was a mom-and-pop shop, Vince certainly didn’t believe it was anymore,” Khan said. “Part of what I believe he was looking for in bringing in someone from the outside was to make sure the community at large didn’t treat it that way. We believe we’re a global content company.”

It wasn’t just the broader sports and entertainment community that Khan targeted with this push. Khan felt that he needed to change internal attitudes, as well.

Just before making the move from CAA Sports to WWE, Khan represented WWE as it sold its media rights to Fox and NBC. The Fox deal is worth $1 billion over five years; the NBC deal is worth around $1.3 billion over five years.

During those 2018 negotiations, Khan was struck by the attitude of some WWE staffers, most of whom were not steeped in the intricacies of media. Some of them, he said, acted as though they were fortunate just to have a seat at the table. They were content to negotiate with executives far down the chain of command.

Khan believed that business attitude — not to mention an overall knowledge of the media marketplace — needed to change at WWE.

“Vince believed that WWE was at a place where it had earned a seat at the adult table, but others in the company didn’t see it that way,” Khan said.

Since Khan joined WWE, he and Vince McMahon have overseen an almost complete turnover of WWE’s media division. The types of media deals WWE cuts have changed. So, too, have the executives who negotiate them.

The WWE has undergone so many changes since Khan joined in August 2020 that rumors have run rampant that WWE is prepping itself for a sale. Khan said the company has taken some inbound calls from companies looking to buy. But he stressed that WWE is not in active conversations trying to sell the company and is not actively looking to sell.

Khan came to WWE after spending 13 years as one of the most powerful talent agents in the business. Soon after relocating across the country to Connecticut, Khan went on a hiring spree. His goal was to bring in executives who shared Vince McMahon’s vision about the size and influence of the company.

“For the company to be treated the way that Vince, Stephanie, [WWE executive] Kevin Dunn and myself and others believed it should be treated in the community, you needed executives who reflected that, who had range, who could get people on the phone and who could be taken seriously by their peers,” he said.

The McMahons and Khan hired four executives from DAZN: Jamie Horowitz, head of development and digital; Chris Legentil, head of global communications; Steve Braband, head of digital; and Colin Campbell, head of development. They hired three executives from CAA: Scott Zanghellini and Alex Varga, heads of revenue strategy and development; and Kirsten Polley, senior vice president of operations. They hired Claudine Lilien from Fox to run sales and partnerships. They also picked up executives from ESPN, HBO and Showtime.

The result has been a series of moves that show a changing media strategy at the company.

It embarked on a new streaming strategy that licensed its over-the-top service, WWE Network, to Peacock as part of a five-year, $1 billion deal, opting to partner with a big media company that can promote its programming rather than to try an compete in an increasingly crowded market.

“In what is now a cluttered OTT subscriber marketplace, it only made sense to partner with somebody,” Khan said.

WWE executives see that deal as a template for similar international streaming deals.

WWE decided to partner with other production houses not affiliated with the company on programming using its biggest stars.

“We want to be in business with everybody who is a real player in this business,” Khan said. “Understanding the business — where it’s at and where it’s heading — is a key part to all of this.”

Bill Simmons is executive producing a multipart documentary on the life of Vince McMahon for Netflix. Simmons earlier handled the Andre the Giant documentary for HBO. WWE signed a deal to resurrect A&E’s “Biography” series, which will focus on talent like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin. And it signed a deal with Blumhouse for a scripted series called “The United States of America vs. Vince McMahon.”

WWE’s management unrolled an ambitious live events schedule that will see the company stage the most number of events in stadiums this year, starting with Jan. 29’s Royal Rumble from The Dome in St. Louis.

One of its strategies is to stage events on different nights of the week, moving, for example, SummerSlam to a Saturday night from a Sunday night. WWE credited that move with helping the event post the largest gate in its history.

“Obviously, this is a huge opportunity to grow revenue in the live events business,” Khan said, mentioning that ticket sales for this month’s Royal Rumble are tracking at an all-time high for the event.