WWE Facing WrestleMania Chaos As Ticket Sales Plummet

WWE is facing all sorts of issues for WrestleMania 42, and Paul Levesque is starting to get fingers pointed at him.

Only one match has been made official for WrestleMania 42 as Roman Reigns will challenge CM Punk for the World Heavyweight Championship after Reigns won the recent Royal Rumble.

But it seems, behind the scenes, things are in disarray in WWE. It’s been reported that Chief Content Officer Paul Levesque – Triple H – has ripped up most of its planned card for the event amid sluggish ticket sales, despite only one match being publicly announced.

So what is really going on?

WWE Struggling With WrestleMania Ticket Sales

Speaking on Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer explained that WWE is facing major challenges for WrestleMania as fans are not buying tickets the way they were a year ago:

Before the Rumble, they had a complete card for WrestleMania. I was told that everything is up in the air. The way it was described to me is, this makes no sense, but what I was told was that they’re very disappointed with the advance, it’s down about 18% from last year at the same time. I think they’ll still fill it, but they are disappointed.

The problem is they think changing a card that nobody knows, because literally people only know one match, changing the card, it’s not like they have a bad card out there and nobody’s buying tickets. In that case, yeah, sure, think about changing the card. They don’t have a card out there.

Meltzer noted that there has been criticism of Paul Levesque within the company as a result of multiple changes, but then explained that the problems facing WrestleMania have nothing to do with the planned card:

There’s been a lot of internal criticism of Paul Levesque, as far as, like, they keep changing the plans essentially, like Vince McMahon. They have a plan, then they change the plan, and now everything is up in the air because the advance is down, and it may be down more because the comps are included in that number, and you don’t know how many are comps.

The problems are, number one, ticket prices are really high, a lot higher than last year. Number two, a lot of foreigners won’t come to the United States right now, and many who will only come once this year are coming for the World Cup. It’s one of the reasons WrestleMania is in Vegas again; tourism is down throughout the United States, but Vegas has been hit hard. Because of that, they asked to get WrestleMania back, and WWE obliged. A lot of people from Europe and a lot of people paricularly from Canada, aren’t coming.

Meltzer’s co-host Bryan Alvarez summed up what he sees as the biggest issue facing WrestleMania:

It’s the price. It’s not only the price of tickets, it’s the price of tickets and the price of Vegas. […] You have to pop for tickets for two nights, you have to fly in, you’ve got to get your hotel, you have to do all of this.

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