World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is the reference company for world wrestling and on Monday 51 percent of its shares were sold to Endeavor, a US company that groups investments in the world of sport and entertainment. Among Endeavor’s subsidiaries is the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the world‘s most watched mixed martial arts league, which will now merge with WWE to create one of the largest groups in the global entertainment industry, whose value will exceed 20 billion dollars.
This merger doesn’t have a name yet but it has already been illustrated in details. The new company will be 51 percent controlled by Endeavor, while the remaining 49 will remain with WWE (which was valued at a total of $9.3 billion during the purchase). Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel will also have the same role in the new group, while Vince McMahon, historic head of WWE, will be executive chairman of the board of directors. At the head of the two leagues there will instead be Dana White, former president and “image man” of the UFC, and Nick Khan, hitherto CEO of WWE. With this structure, the two leagues will continue to operate in their respective fields, but in a single group and therefore with greater collaboration.
The operation was made official a few hours before Wrestlemania, WWE’s most important annual event. For the company, the merger will be a sea change, explained McMahon, the main figure behind the worldwide success achieved by American professional wrestling in recent decades.
McMahon inherited WWE (then WWF) from his father in the 1980s. The league was founded in the 1950s as a wrestling federation active on the East Coast between Washington, New York and Boston. In fact, at the time wrestling was already famous and followed throughout the United States, but a real industry did not yet exist: instead there were about thirty different federations that divided up the national territory, each of which was managed by local promoters and had its own reference characters.
In this panorama, the WWF distinguished itself as a “dominant” federation for the resources made available and for the quality of the shows offered. He definitively took over the others when, in the eighties, Vince McMahon exploited the arrival of cable television to expand the WWF in the United States. The shows began to be taped theatrically and then broadcast across the country. In this way, the US public accustomed to local wrestling discovered a federation with much higher standards and with the best characters, starting with André the Giant, the first great world-famous wrestler, to whom many others were later added.
In this way the current WWE gradually eliminated local competition and now in fact constitutes a monopoly of professional wrestling not only nationally, but globally. It also takes advantage of this great relevance to launch its best characters in the world of more traditional entertainment, as happened for Hulk Hogan, Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) and John Cena.
The UFC has been a different path, but similar in results. Born as a rather chaotic and unregulated league, in the early 2000s it was taken over by two Italian-American brothers, Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, at the suggestion of Dana White, the historic president. Under their management, the league sorted itself out, became more institutional, and organized itself in such a way as to regularly offer the best MMA fights in the best possible environment. The great success of recent years was instead possible thanks to the impact on the public of characters such as Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor, who definitively brought the UFC out of its niche of fans.
Although they offer very different shows, albeit both fighting (one fake, the other real), there has always been some sort of collaboration between WWE and UFC. While the UFC was in the process of relaunching, for example, McMahon agreed to have his events aired immediately after those of the WWE, and this greatly helped its spread in the United States. Several athletes then moved from one league to another, such as CM Punk and Ronda Rousey, even several times over the years, as in the case of Brock Lesnar.
For McMahon, the merger came at the “right time” even though, as has been pointed out, his family will no longer own the company after seventy years. He had also recently had to leave the management roles he had held for almost forty years after being accused of misconduct and sexual harassment. After an initial suspension, last July he left them permanently, except to remain the majority shareholder. In January, however, he had returned as chairman of the board of directors in place of his daughter Stephanie to oversee the sale of the company.
The new group controlled by Endeavor will seek to “maximize the value of the combined television rights, improve the monetization of sponsorships, develop new forms of content and pursue other strategic mergers and acquisitions to further strengthen the brand”.
– Read also: The short life and the myth of André the Giant