Nick Khan says the distribution gaps that stopped some fans from watching WWE premium live events on ESPN have now been closed, and that the complaints in between were the cost of a deal WWE knew would take time to bed in.
Khan was asked about the backlash on The Varsity with John Ourand, after Ourand noted that ESPN Unlimited was not carried by every provider when the partnership launched.
ESPN Unlimited is the streaming tier the company launched last year, and WWE’s premium live events moved onto it in the United States as part of the partnership. The gap fans ran into was that the service was not carried by every distributor at launch, so a subscriber with the wrong provider could not get to a show they had previously watched on Peacock.
Khan said WWE went in aware of it.
“We knew going into the deal that the Comcast distribution deal was not done. ESPN promised us it would get done. It got done,” Khan said. “We knew YouTube, that deal wasn’t done. They promised us that it would get done. It got done. So now we have the distribution that we needed from the outset that we knew was going to take a minute.”
The app is now carried on both YouTube TV and Comcast. Khan named Justin Connolly, the former Disney distribution executive who moved to YouTube, as the person on the other side of that negotiation.
On the complaints themselves, he was unbothered.
“In terms of complaints, sports fans in general, it’s sort of why Twitter, now X, was created,” he said.
He said WWE does read them and does act on some.
“Those complaints, some of them we look at and we say, hey, there’s some truth to this. Let’s make a little adjustment here, this or that,” Khan said. “But you cannot cater.”
His argument is that running a company off the loudest reaction is a losing method.
“For companies that read it, believe it, and react to it, it never ever works,” he said. He used politics as the illustration, arguing that businesses which have taken hard positions at either end have found that most people are not there, and that social media is a poor guide to what an audience actually wants.
What he said companies have to do instead is trust the people they hired.
“You have to rely on your team. We have the best creative in terms of all of wrestling in Triple H, the best live events team, the best merchandise and consumer products team,” Khan said. “They’re able to monetise it. If you’ve seen the growth in TKO with UFC, WWE, On Location, IMG, PBR, each of these continue to grow every year. It’s not easy, but it’s not supposed to be easy.”
He also pushed back on the idea that complaints mean people are leaving, asking Ourand about following the Baltimore Orioles and pointing at the volume of criticism the Los Angeles Lakers take without losing anyone. His position is that the bigger the brand, the bigger the expectation, and that he puts WWE in that company.
“There are wins and losses on a daily basis. You just have to hope that you can get more wins than losses, and if you can, in our business, the stock price is high,” Khan said.
WWE and ESPN announced the streaming rights partnership in August 2025, moving premium live events off Peacock in the United States. Khan gave these answers in the same interview where he said WWE is already across the creative for WrestleMania 43 in Riyadh, which takes the biggest show of the year out of the country the complaints came from. His position on both is the same one, that the company is building for a global audience and that the reaction in any single market is not the measure of whether it is working.
