Mark Shapiro, TKO’s chief operating officer, says a lot about WWE and UFC. As someone who covers the TKO quarterly earnings calls and his other speaking engagements I hear a lot of these things over and again.
Shapiro announced in December that WWE would reduce their live touring schedule by 2024, as part of cost-cutting measures. He referred to the cities they would be phased out as “C and DD counties”, which was a slight misphrase.
Shapiro hinted at a possible increase in ticket prices for WWE shows happening a few months back. While the weekly TV and PLEs will remain, the near-extinction domestic WWE house shows is imminent. This puts their less frequent appearances at a high premium. The first domestic event schedule for 2025 confirms this.
Look, I get it. WWE house shows don’t make as much money as TKO would like, especially when they travel to smaller venues than those in “A’ cities such as New York, Boston Los Angeles, Chicago etc. In the current era, where TV rights are everything, non-televised shows are a completely different animal. They were bound to be whittled down. TKO is not a fan of the cost of running these events, even though talent enjoys working on them. Shapiro noted that they were once a favorite event for Vince McMahon.
As I walked to cover AEW Dynamite this past Wednesday in Manchester, New Hampshire, the impact of Shapiro’s comments on wrestling fans hit me hard.
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I’m sure many of you who are reading this have never lived in a “A” city, but I did spend 15 years in Manchester. It’s also where I met my wife, and grew professionally. I was a member of the front desk for the hockey team which helped launch the SNHU Arena in 2001 (then Verizon Wireless Arena). This is the same venue where AEW made its debut on Wednesday. I was there for the first WWE show at the building in 2002 which attracted more than 11,000 people, including New Hampshire native Triple H. I also attended Raw and SmackDown tapes, Backlash and even some house shows in that same arena. Cagematch reports that the city has a population of 115,000 people and has hosted WWE wrestling since 1967.
According to WWE’s metrics Manchester is not a “A” city. However, I and many others felt that it was one quite often. The city with the longest dead-end street in America, which is located near Boston, will likely not see any live WWE action in the near future. The same goes for Portland, Maine where I attended my first WWE live show when I was a child and saw Hulk Hogan. The same goes for Bangor Maine, where I went to my one and only WCW show, and was lucky enough to see Goldberg, the then-upstart phenom, with a few thousands other people.
These experiences are what made me a wrestling fan, why i work for this site, why i attend indies, and why i almost started an independent in a previous life. I also met many great people who work in the industry and love it like you and me. These experiences are why many of your favorite professional wrestlers entered the business, and thought “I’d love to do that one day.” It was the WWE NIL Program in an extremely different format: cultivating the next generation by simply immersing them into the live experience.
I’m sure you could use the names Manchester and Portland, and then insert your own town or city, and we would have had similar experiences. It’s a little depressing to see that the WWE’s house shows for smaller cities are coming to an end. It’s the cost of progress, I think.
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It’s important that pro wrestling, like AEW, comes to Manchester and smaller cities. On a warm November midweek evening, the city was buzzing with excitement. A friend who isn’t a wrestling fan but still works at the same arena 20 years later was excited to have AEW in town, citing that it would be broadcast live on national television. For those of us who are constantly on social media and write for websites, this doesn’t matter as much as it used to, as we have become desensitized. But, to people in smaller cities who live and work, it does. For a few short hours, someone else’s corner of the globe is their focus. That’s a great feeling.
Not only AEW can take advantage of this void. TNA has been touring smaller U.S. towns (including this weekend) and NJPW was back in Lowell, Massachusetts on Friday. There are many independents running around the country to satisfy those who cannot travel to a larger city to see WWE due to budget, proximity or other factors.
This is no reason to weep over WWE. If I were a higher-up, I would probably make the exact same decision, even if it means that they may be excluding those who cannot afford the higher ticket prices or the travel costs associated with visiting larger cities. WWE may have always been destined to be like the big touring acts that come through every few years. I wasn’t prepared for it to happen so quickly.
WWE may not be in C and D Cities anymore, but that doesn’t make the people who live there forgettable. It’s now up to the promotions to remind fans of their importance.
Josh Nason is a contributing editor at F4WOnline.com. He has been doing so since 2012.
Column: Why ‘C & D towns’ still matter and the slow death of WWE House Shows in todays Wrestling news, Chatalong Chatbox, Results will be Hidden inside a spoiler Button so you will not bet spoiled about direct results.
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