WWE made tons of cuts, releases and financial cutbacks in the last few weeks.
We're told WWE was tasked with shedding "millions" in payroll over the last month or so, and cuts were made in order to make that a reality. This was met with heavy criticism within the industry, as the pay packages for TKO executives were revealed at the same time as record-high stocks. Most of the people within the industry we spoke to know that releases are a reality of WWE's plans moving forward, but beyond that, asking talent to take a paycut of seven figures per year in many cases was heavily criticized and scoffed at.
We spoke to some within the talent and agent worlds who said that this round of cuts and paycuts will likely cause heavy changes in how talent negotiate contracts with TKO and WWE moving forward, noting that there is very little confidence that the life-changing, big money deals that a lot of wrestlers sign will see through the life of the deals.
Fightful Select's Sean Ross Sapp was told that a number of wrestlers in recent years were approached during overseas dates about new deals, some way earlier than they anticipated being offered new deals. Some there saw this as an approach to get talent to sign before their reps could take a look at things, but that was more of an opinion than anything. However, the day of the mass releases, WWE approached numerous talent and asked them to take pay cuts in order to remain with the company. Several of them that we heard about were given two days to make that decision. New Day's Austin Creed and Kofi Kingston pretty quickly made the decision that they would rather leave the company. Despite the pay cut offered, the duo still left millions of dollars on the table over the next four years. In a similar situation, when Killer Kross was given his contract offer last year, he claimed he was given only one day to decide.
We have heard nothing to the rumors that Xavier Woods could return on a digital only deal, as that would prevent him from working for AEW, and effectively cost him millions of dollars over the next few years. As one would expect, a ton of names have pushed internally in All Elite Wrestling for New Day to be hired.
That led to another point of frustration among talent -- New Day, Santos Escobar and others had just signed new deals with WWE in the last year, with some of them not even engaging All Elite Wrestling or other companies. Now with WWE cutting them and their pay, it effectively reduces their leverage. A number of reps noted that it wasn't even smart from a competitive standpoint because you would think that WWE would want AEW to have to spend more money for talent.
No specific names were provided to Fightful regarding who accepted pay cuts, but the percentages shifted across a variety of what has been reported. For those asking why it was easy to find out that New Day were offered pay cuts compared to who actually took them, WWE moving them to the alumni section made it a whole lot easier to learn those stories. We're told that a number of longtime veterans were asked, including some healing up from injuries.
One WWE source had been referenced by another outlet as saying they were disgusted that WWE didn't publicly acknowledge New Day for their contributions. A WWE source said that they did communicate that glowingly privately, and that a joint statement was expected to be issued announcing the departure, and they have no clue why that didn't end up being the case.
