WWE’s Ratings Crisis: A Deeper Dive

Back in the 1990s, it felt like everybody was watching professional wrestling. The infamous ‘Attitude Era’ was at its height, the ‘Monday Night Wars’ between WWE and rival company WCW had everybody glued to their television screens every week, and ratings were at an all-time high. It wasn’t uncommon for both WWE RAW and WCW Nitro to pull in five million viewers each on the same night. That meant ten million people in the United States of America were watching wrestling regularly. 

That boom period is now long gone. WCW went bankrupt and was eventually acquired by WWE. Huge stars like ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin, Hulk Hogan, and the Rock are long since retired, and the new stars who came in to replace them haven’t captured the public’s attention in the same way. The biggest stars in WWE right now are Roman Reigns and Becky Lynch, but it’s far less likely that the average person in the street will have heard their names than the stars of the 1990s. Ratings have been declining for wrestling for a long time, but in the past few weeks, they’ve hit rock bottom. Two weeks ago, the company’s flagship Monday night show pulled in fewer than one and a half million viewers for the first time in its history. 

There are several reasons that the company can point to in an attempt to explain this trend, and they’ve already used most of their excuses. The global crisis that’s preventing people from attending WWE’s shows in person has doubtless had an effect, as the product isn’t the same without fans, but that’s only amplified a trend that started long before 2020. Ratings dipped below three million around eighteen months ago, and have never found their way back. John Cena, who was for years the company’s biggest star in the post-Austin and Rock era, has left the ring to pursue a career in Hollywood, but it falls on the company’s shoulders to create new stars. For reasons that most wrestling journalists struggle to explain, they’ve failed to do so. 

Part of this has to be put down to the company’s over-reliance on aging stars at the top of the card. Tune in to the show on Monday nights now, and you’ll see wrestlers like Randy Orton, the Big Show, and Edge occupying television time and main event spots. These are the same performers who were in the ring twenty years ago or more, and they routinely beat younger wrestlers when they appear. That tells the audience that the stars of the past are a bigger deal than the stars of the present, and in the process, it diminishes the audience’s enthusiasm for the younger performers. If the ‘big’ names grow stale and yet the younger performers are positioned as if they’re worth less than the stars of the past, there’s no reason for viewers to invest in them. As the sharp decline in viewership proves, they’re responding to that presentation by tuning out – and there may now be no way to persuade them to tune back in again. 

The company’s recent public relations disasters can’t have helped matters much either. CEO Vince McMahon signed a lucrative multi-year, multi-million dollar agreement to stage shows in Saudi Arabia three years ago, but then the Khashoggi incident happened and international pressure on Saudi Arabia and its human rights record intensified. Various figures and media outlets, including those that rarely cover wrestling like John Oliver, called on the company to pull out of its cozy relationship with the Saudi government on ethical grounds. Instead of doing so, WWE took the money and carried on going there. The decline in viewership has coincided with WWE’s Saudi visits, and some – if not all – of the blame should surely be laid at the door of that decision. 

In another divisive step, Vince McMahon took up a position in a group put together by President Donald Trump to help him to decide when to open up the country’s sporting venues again. That further solidified the view that the McMahon family is very friendly with the President, helped along by the fact that Linda McMahon, Vince’s wife, is directly employed by Trump and is working on his re-election campaign. Trump is a member of WWE’s Hall of Fame and appeared on WWE programming multiple times before entering politics. Politics and sport have never gone well together, and if posts on social media are anything to go by, those who oppose the President have decided that they can no longer support a wrestling promotion that supports him. They, too, have tuned out. 

In the short term, WWE has the finances to cope with the loss of viewership and the lack of fans in live attendance. The new television deals they signed with the USA Network and FOX over a year ago guarantee them more television money than they’ve ever had before for broadcasting. They also have action figures, merchandise, video games, and even a forthcoming range of gambling attractions for online slots websites that should go live toward the end of this year. Tellingly, the majority of the stars who appear as the faces of the new UK casino are stars of the past as opposed to members of the current roster. For that to be the case, WWE must, on some level, be aware that their current generation of wrestlers won’t persuade people to spend as much money playing their online slots as their legends of the past are likely to. That still works as a way of making money for now, but the nostalgia element can’t last forever. One day, people’s memories of the legends will fade. If there’s nothing new to replace them, there will be nothing to incentivize fans to pay for online slots or any of the company’s other products, including tickets. 

Vince McMahon, now in his mid-70s, may soon have a decision to make. He took over his father’s company more than thirty years ago and took it from a regional wrestling show to a global sensation. He’s now led that same company into a crisis. With television executives panicking and ratings in freefall, and a shiny new rival company emerging in the shape of Tony Khan’s All Elite Wrestling, he must decide if he’s still the right man to turn the ship around. If he isn’t, then it might be time to retire and let somebody else ring the changes.