As noted before, WWE’s WrestleMania 43 event in 2027 will be taking place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
A recent Joy Forum 2025 event featured WWE President Nick Khan as one of the guests. One of the topics discussed included Khan’s thoughts about WWE’s decision to bring WrestleMania 43 to Saudi Arabia and his belief that WWE fans will travel to the event.
“It was a natural next step for us. In WWE, we realized a number of years ago that we can’t simply pipe American product out globally and hope to be a global product. You actually have to have boots on the ground. If you look at what we’ve done with our Premium Live Events over the last few years, about half of those now take place outside of the United States. We’re in the eighth year of a long-term partnership with Turki Al-Sheikh and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We’re bringing Royal Rumble here at the end of January. It’s the first time Royal Rumble, which is our second or third biggest event, will take place outside of the US or Canada. WrestleMania 2027 will be here in April of that year, first time ever WrestleMania will be outside of the US or Canada. We’re excited. We think viewership is going to be strong. We think people will come to the Kingdom to see our show and we’re going to put on a spectacle.”
Khan also gave his thoughts about why Saudi Arabia was chosen over another country.
“WWE had received a number of different offers from entities outside of the US, and to me, as I try to help lead the company, it’s all about relationships. A word used too often in our business is ‘partnership,’ but when you’re actually partners with somebody and you can all them and say, ‘There is an issue on this. Can we fix it?’ ‘Yeah, no problem.’ That’s what Turki and [Saudi] have done with us, repeatedly. When Turki expressed interest in having it here, we got together for a couple of different meetings, worked out the deal in short order, and had the good fortune of announcing it the day before Canelo-Crawford, our first fight together in Las Vegas.”
Transcript h/t: Fightful.com
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