TKO President Mark Shapiro on WWE Cutting Back on Live Events in 2025 & Potential Plans to Increase Ticket Prices

A recent Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference 2024 event in San Francisco, California featured Endeavor President and COO and TKO Group President Mark Shapiro as one of the guest speakers.

One of the topics discussed included Shapiro announcing that WWE will be cutting back on the number of live events they will be holding in 2025 with the goal of around 200 events in total.

“We’re cutting events at WWE. We’re taking our low-margin, marginally profitable events, untelevised events that Vince put in place to grow the brand, right? You’re taking the show on the road, we’ve gotta go to every city we can get to grow the WWE brand. Well, the WWE brand, while we still have to grow it, it’s on fire right now. We don’t need to carry these marginally profitable events. Andrew Schleimer, our CFO and Nick Khan at WWE have been hands on involved with cutting back those events, trimming those events. What was 300 [events] last year will be roughly 250 this year. And next year, we’ll be close to 200.”

Shapiro also stated that TKO currently feels that tickets for WWE events remain underpriced and hinted at the potential of a ticket price increase for WWE events. Shapiro mentioned that WWE did not have dynamic pricing tools in the past and WWE events could follow the current trend in the concert industry of ticket prices increasing as demand increases.

Transcript h/t: Fightful.com, F4WOnline.com