Backlash France Breaks Unwanted WWE Record
Backlash France might have seemed like another huge success for WWE but there’s one unwanted record the show seems to have broken.
Backlash France saw a WWE star return after a decade away from the company to join The Bloodline and solidify Solo Sikoa’s place as Tribal Chief.
The show also saw Jey Uso fail to dethrone Damian Priest for the World Heavyweight Championship and Jade Cargill claim her first gold in WWE as she and Bianca Belair defeated The Kabuki Warriors for the WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship.
Bayley retained her WWE Women’s Championship against Tiffany Stratton and Naomi and it was a clean sweep for the singles champions in action as Cody Rhodes defeated AJ Styles in the main event to remain WWE Champion.
Despite the show being generally well received by fans and the French crowd being lauded for their energy and volume throughout, it seems that general interest in Backlash France may have been down.
Backlash France Shows WWE Dip
Speaking on Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer explained that the Backlash France show did not seem to generate the same amount of interest as previous WWE PLEs in 2024 and although the pay-per-view model has changed dramatically, the show will go down as having by far the lowest PPV buys in WWE history:
The last WWE show, the show from France as far as interest levels with the public – got the Google number, got the PPV number, it’s very clear that this show for whatever reason, this show did not have much interest as compared to a normal WWE show.
The Google searches were the lowest for any WWE pay-per-view I’ve ever seen, 100,000. It’s early, so the first week number it’s gonna grow but the first week number it was like 3700.
Financially a WWE PPV number doesn’t mean anything, because most of the people are going to be watching on Peacock, but the one thing a PPV number can tell you is how much interest is there, and this one was down 39% from the same period leading into the Chamber show, which was the Perth show. It was the lowest in history for a WWE show as far as PPV buys and it looks to be by a significant margin.