Following the news that WWE had agreed to be acquired by The Endeavor Group with the idea for WWE and UFC to merge to create a new publicly traded company, there has been concern regarding talent releases and employee layoffs.
Shortly after the acquisition was announced, Endeavor COO Mark Shapiro stated that employee layoffs would happen since Endeavor already has people in departments that can handle things at certain WWE departments.
As exclusively reported by WrestlingNews.co on our Patreon page last month, some people in WWE are worried about mass releases.
While speaking to Lightshed Live, WWE CEO Nick Khan gave some insight into the expected cuts by giving a rough estimate:
“If you look at what Endeavor was able to take out, cost-wise, from UFC in 2016 or shortly after that deal was done, we have the same expectation here. We think 50 (million) is a really conservative number. We have integration teams now, we’re going to get those in shape, I think we’ll have a better sense of it in a month or two. We’re going to be pretty aggressive with them to make sure that, for our shareholders and for our company, our organization is as lean and mean as possible, and we’re going to rely on the Endeavor flywheel to make up the rest.”
As of this writing, it’s unclear when the cuts will happen.
