WWE surprised everyone when John Cena made a one-off return to the company over the weekend to try and bring WrestleMania to the city. No formal announcement was made on whether WrestleMania will actually be held in the city but Dave Meltzer of The Wrestling Observer spoke more about why WWE did this segment.
He said “Obviously they’re saying it because of AEW at Wembley, and they want to go in there and they’ll do two shows at Wembley and they’ll sell out both shows for WrestleMania, I’m sure of that, and set all-time gate records for that. But, for WWE, that’s not enough because WWE wants the city to spend — like UFC, 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.”
The issue at play here is that London is already able to bring tourists in on their own since the city is the number one tourist city in all of Europe. Therefore, they do not feel the need to pay WWE for a bid to host since they will naturally be bringing people into the area anyway. WWE has 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.
By bringing in John Cena to stir up some hype, it may persuade officials to pay up to bring the event to London. Meltzer said, “They didn’t want to 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 use this thing to tell the city, ‘Hey, we can do this.’ It’s a real interesting game.”
WrestleMania 40 in 2024 is already set for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. No further WrestleMania events have been announced yet although Nashville has received word that they will receive the event in 2027 if they complete the build of their new stadium.
Thanks to Wrestling Inc. for providing the above quotes.
