WWE brought in John Cena for a segment with Grayson Waller at Saturday’s Money in the Bank, where the former WWE Champion hit an AA to the young star. Before the spot, Cena continuously noted he wanted to bring WrestleMania to London, UK.
While many picked up on WWE doing this due to AEW holding All In at Wembley Stadium, there’s more behind the teases.
While speaking on Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer noted that WWE is interested in bringing WrestleMania to London. However, they’ve been using the strategy of having cities bid on big events, including WrestleMania, due to the local economic boost that WWE events bring to the cities.
However, because London is able to bring in tourists on its own, they’re not willing to pay WWE to host a show in the city. That’s why Clash at the Castle wasn’t held in London last year. Thus, if WWE can get enough fan interest in having Mania in London, then the city may consider paying to have it.
“We can all figure out what this is about. Well, there are a couple of things. I mean, so, so you know, on Thursday morning when I woke up in my emails, I got 30% off on AEW video game and all these new characters Thursday morning, the same day as the AEW game came out. They’re advertising it on TV. They advertise it on the show tonight. That’s WWE. That’s how it is. And you know, it’s what should be expected. I mean, there’s 40 years of knowing how that game goes. And this is another example obviously. So the thing here is really tricky because either they do it or they disappoint the people. Now the strategy on this is normally, let’s just say just an example, when WrestleMania came to Santa Clara, California, okay? They went in there, and, you know, they did their presentation.
I knew all about it, you know, they had asked me for help and everything. So go in there, do the presentation and everything. When they got it, it was like, you cannot say anything to anybody. You cannot. I mean, it still can leak out, but it’s like there. They don’t want anyone talking about it until they make the announcement. You know, like if they’re gonna come to whatever city, it’s like when they make the announcement. So to go in here, this is complete obviously they’re saying it because AEW at Wembley and they want to go in there at Wembley and they’ll do two shows at Wembley and they will sell out both shows for WrestleMania, I’m sure of that, and set and set gate records, you know, all time gate records for that. But for WWE that’s not enough because WWE wants the city to spend like UFC, you know, the whole gimmick. Now it’s not about your gate, it’s about how much money you can get to be paid to come in millions and millions of dollars.
The deal is, is that London because you’re looking for tourists. Well, London, as I actually just found out, London is the number one tourist city in all of Europe. And they don’t need to pay WWE to bring in tourists because they’re gonna get tourists that week and every week they’re getting 20 million tourists a year or some crazy number. So an insane number. So they don’t need to do this, but WWE doesn’t want, let’s just say the two gates together are, are 30 million that they’ll get and, and it may be it’s not enough for WWE, you know, they want that and especially because they’re, if they do it for no money, look at all these cities are gonna get mad at having to pay big money. So the point is, is that London doesn’t want to pay, okay? They didn’t wanna pay for that pay-per-view last year. And that’s why it went to Cardiff. WWE does want to do WrestleMania there because the audience is great. They can do a great gate but they want the city to pay to bring them in. So this is a way to kind of use this thing to tell the city, ‘Hey, you know, we can do this.’ It’s a really interesting game, you know, because we’ll see how it plays out.
Therefore a lot of money to get WrestleMania into London. There’s negatives to it, but not really as much as before. I mean, like, if it was four years ago or something like that, they would’ve, it would not even be considered. But, for a lot of reasons, you know, it’s, strongly considered and, and it’d be a super memorable show if they could do it. London can do a bigger gate than, you know, I’d say London would be London and New York would probably be the places where you would do the biggest gates.”
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