Real Reason WWE Delayed Major MSG Announcement
WWE has finally announced the company is maintaining an annual tradition but the reason for their hesitation in confirming it has now been revealed.
When WWE announced its December schedule back in September there was one glaring omission fans were quick to notice. With house shows dwindling on the company’s calendar, WWE confirmed that they were holding a live event holiday tour but the annual 26th of December show at Madison Square Garden in New York City was missing from the company’s announcement.
However, now the announcement that WWE was returning to its spiritual home of Madison Square Garden was made during Monday’s New York Knicks game at MSG by Knicks’ star Jalen Brunson confirming the tradition will continue.
WWE Returning To New York
Speaking about the updates on Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer gave some insight as to why WWE held off announcing the holiday week show as they also had two other shows in the New York market that they were trying to promote:
Look, you don’t get a December 26 date in Madison Square Garden at the last minute. They probably have always had this on the schedule, but the decision was made to wait for the Barclays Center show. Because I think that the idea is that the Barclays Center show was not sold out until the very end. So I think that they wanted to make sure that they sold out the Barclays Center show, which would have been the show on Friday night, the double taping.
They still have Saturday Night’s Main Event on December 14, which is not sold out, but probably will be, because they haven’t even announced the matches yet. By the time they announce the matches, I think they’ll sell out, but I think the idea is they didn’t probably want three shows in the same market all being promoted at the same time. So they wait till one was gone, and now they’ve got the Nassau show, and then 12 days later they’re coming back for the MSG house show, which is a traditional show almost every year, other than the pandemic, for the last probably decade or so.
Even before that it was somewhat traditional to do that holiday week show in Madison Square Garden, biggest house show of the year in the United States. When they announced the December schedule it wasn’t there and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a tradition.’ But in fact, it was just that they did not want to announce it until the SmackDown tapings were over.
They announced on Raw tonight, actually announced earlier in the day. Jalen Brunson basically makes the announcement. So, getting that celebrity involvement in that. So they announced it on the TV show, and they announced it also in the afternoon. And yeah, usually they’re not going to promote a house show like this, but this is the big house show of the year, traditionally.
On Boxing Day 2023 in Madison Square Garden, CM Punk competed in his first WWE match in almost ten years following his return to the company at Survivor Series. Punk defeated Dominik Mysterio in a singles match and had one more match with Mysterio on the company’s holiday tour before his ill-fated appearance in the Royal Rumble where he was injured at the hands of Drew McIntyre.