Roman Reigns says WWE’s TV rights deals have made it too risky for him to work non-televised live events.
Reigns told Shannon Sharpe on Part 2 of his Club Shay Shay interview, released Wednesday, that WWE is trying to run more live events, but that the money on its TV shows changes the math for him.
“We’re just at a business model where TV rights are TV rights, and there’s just so much money on the line that we got to that point where it’s just like it doesn’t make sense for me to do live events anymore. Right? What if I got hurt? You know, there’s so much money that’s riding on Mondays and Fridays and our PLEs now that I can’t just go out there and wrestle for, you know 4000, 5000 only. You know, just for those eyes only. Now I got to conserve it,” Reigns said.
Reigns said fans who criticize his schedule forget how much he worked in his first years on the main roster.
“And now with my schedule, people will pick on it, but they don’t remember. They don’t remember from, you know, 2012 to 2018, when I was doing 150, 200 shows a year, every single year, you know, just working my a** off, but staying in the lab, continually getting the reps, conquering my 10,000 hours, you know what I mean, putting my time in, that’s where I learned how to do everything,” he said.
He called those live-event reps “critical,” because a wrestler can run the same match in front of a fresh crowd each night and adjust the tempo and details.
“You can just tinker with things and play with them when you can do it all weekend long, and then go do a semblance of that, or like you put it all together on a Monday. You know, it’s just a different process now,” Reigns said.
WWE’s four main media deals are worth about $1.2 billion a year combined, according to Wrestlenomics. They include Netflix’s 10-year, $5 billion deal for Raw, which began in January 2025, USA Network’s five-year, $1.4 billion deal for SmackDown and ESPN’s five-year, $1.6 billion deal for premium live events.
WWE has advertised Reigns for seven dates through the end of November, all of them episodes of Raw or SmackDown or premium live events. The next is Raw in San Diego on October 19, followed by Crown Jewel in Riyadh on November 7 and Survivor Series: WarGames in Houston on November 28.
Analysis:
Reigns is not the first top star WWE has built its biggest shows around on a limited schedule. Brock Lesnar held the Universal Championship as a part-time champion for most of 2017 and 2018, and The Rock and The Undertaker worked select dates late in their careers.
His schedule also makes sense given his health history. Reigns was first diagnosed with leukemia in 2007, and he relinquished the Universal Championship in October 2018 when it returned. He announced in February 2019 that it was in remission. Fewer dates means less wear on his body.
To his credit, Reigns did put in the years. He worked a full-time schedule from his main roster debut in 2012 until his leukemia returned in 2018, then again from his return in 2019 until the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
He is also not the only one working less. WWE no longer runs the full live event schedule it did before the pandemic, so the whole roster works fewer dates than it used to, even as the company starts adding live events back.
