NJPW owner Takaaki Kidani has big goals for Wrestle Kingdom next year, although admits one mistake with Wrestle Dynasty.
This weekend’s Wrestle Kingdom 19 was a big success for NJPW. It drew 24,107 to the Tokyo Dome, although that was down from 27,422 in 2024. Wrestle Dynasty drew a further 16300 fans, giving NJPW over 40,000 tickets sold for their big weekend in wrestling.
Despite this success, they want next year to be even bigger. NJPW owner Takaaki Kidani spoke to Tokyo Sports (H/T to Fightful) where he revealed that he hopes the company draw over 40,000 for Wrestle Kingdom 20.
The retirement of Hiroshi Tanahashi at the baseball stadium should bring in extra eyes to the show. However, he is unsure if they made the best call having Wrestle Dynasty just one day after Wrestle Kingdom.
“I’d like to have more than 40,000 people attend [Wrestle Kingdom] next year. I think that’s the bare minimum. I’d like to have a lot of other events besides Tanahashi (Hiroshi)’s retirement match. I’ll spend a year on that. In the sports world, basketball and volleyball are doing really well, aren’t they? I think pro wrestling is losing out to them. There are still many issues to be addressed, including the fact that we haven’t been able to attract customers from overseas, but I’m okay with this being a growing pain as we move to the next stage,” he said.
However, he added that maybe it was a mistake to do the AEW co-promoted Wrestle Dynasty just one night after Wrestle Kingdom.
“Perhaps it would be better to do it at the place where we separated them at January 4th. As a point of reflection, we couldn’t show the colors of the joint event, and we couldn’t show the colors of the rivalry, and I think we ended up halfway through. That’s something to reflect on.” The NJPW boss said.
