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Image: Josh Nason
When it comes to WWE & UFC business, TKO chief operating officer Mark Shapiro says a lot of things. As one of the people that covers the TKO quarterly earning calls and his various other speaking engagements, I hear A LOT of those things over and over and over again.
Last December, Shapiro first dropped the news that WWE would be reducing their live touring schedule in 2024 as part of cost-cutting initiatives, referring to cities they would be phasing out as “C and D counties” in a bit of a misphrase.
Just a few months ago, Shapiro said their schedule would be cut back even more in 2025 while strongly hinting at increasing ticket prices for the WWE shows that were happening. While weekly TV and PLEs remain intact, the near-extinction of domestic WWE house shows appears imminent which puts their more infrequent appearances at a premium, something the first slate of domestic events for 2025 bears out.
Look, I get it. WWE house shows aren’t as profitable as TKO wants them to be, especially when traveling to venues that aren’t as big as those in “A” cities like New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc. Non-televised events are a different animal in the current day where TV rights mean everything and inevitably, they were going to get whittled down. While talent seems to enjoy working on them from a creative and athletic standpoint, TKO doesn’t love how much they cost to run with Shapiro once noting they were a favorite of Vince McMahon.
Nearly a year later, the impending impact of Shapiro’s comments for wrestling fans really hit me as I walked up to cover this past Wednesday’s AEW Dynamite in Manchester, New Hampshire.
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Like many of you reading these words, I have never lived in an “A” city but I did live in Manchester for 15 years. It’s where I both met my wife and grew up professionally. I was part of the front office for the hockey team that helped launch the SNHU Arena (then Verizon Wireless Arena) in 2001 – the same venue AEW debuted at on Wednesday. I was at the first WWE show in the building which drew more than 11,000 fans in 2002, headlined by New Hampshire native Triple H. In that same arena, I attended Raw and SmackDown tapings, Backlash, and even a few house shows. The city’s population is roughly 115,000 and has featured WWE wrestling since 1967 according to Cagematch.
By WWE’s metrics, Manchester is not an “A” city, but to myself and plenty of others, it felt like one a lot of the time. Now likely in the “C” or “D” column, the city with the longest dead end street in America probably won’t see live WWE action anytime soon given its proximity to Boston. Same goes for Portland, Maine, where I first attended a WWE live show as a kid and saw Hulk Hogan for the first time. Same goes for Bangor, Maine, where I attended my lone WCW show and was lucky to see the then-upstart phenom known as Goldberg with a few thousand other people.
Those experiences are part of what made me a fan and why I work for this website, why I attend indies, why I nearly started an indie in a different life, and why I have met a lot of great people that both work in the business and love wrestling like you and I do. Those experiences are also why so many of your favorite pro wrestlers got into the business and thought, “I’d like to do that someday.” It was the WWE NIL program in an extremely different form: cultivating the future by simply immersing people into the live experience.
I’m sure many of you could take the names Manchester, Portland and Bangor, insert your own city or town, and our experiences would be pretty similar. That’s why it’s somewhat depressing that the WWE house show era for smaller cities is coming to an end for the largest and most successful wrestling company ever. It’s the price of progress, I reckon.
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That’s why pro wrestling like AEW coming to Manchester and other smaller cities is important. Walking through the city on an unseasonably warm November midweek night, there was that buzz you feel walking up to a venue for any kind of show. In talking with a friend that isn’t really a wrestling fan and that still works at the arena two decades later, he was thrilled to have AEW there, specifically citing how it was going to be aired live on national TV. To those who write for websites and are monitoring social media 24/7, that doesn’t mean as much to us as we are desensitized, but to people who live and work in the smaller cities, that does matter. For a night, their corner of the world is the focus of someone else’s world for a few hours and that’s a good feeling to have.
It’s not just AEW that can potentially take advantage of the void. TNA has been doing more touring around smaller U.S. cities (including this past weekend) and NJPW returned to Lowell, Massachusetts, on Friday. There are countless indies running all around the country looking to scratch that itch for those who are unable to travel to see WWE in a bigger city due to budgets, proximity or other reasons.
All of this is certainly no reason to weep for WWE and if I was a higher-up there, I’d probably make the same decision even if they are potentially freezing out those who can’t afford the higher prices and the potential travel costs in visiting larger cities. Perhaps WWE was always destined to become like big touring acts who come through once every few years. I just wasn’t ready for it to happen this quickly.
While C and D cities may not be a destination for WWE anymore, that doesn’t mean the people that live there should be forgotten by wrestling at large. Now, it’s up to the promotions that do run there to remind fans that they are worth remembering.
Josh Nason has been a contributing editor to F4WOnline.com since 2012.
