He also spoke about Dwayne Johnson’s comeback to wrestling and joining the TKO Board.
WWE is in the midst of their WrestleMania week festivities and it’ll cap off with the two-night event on April 6th and 7th from Lincoln Financial Field.
On the lead-up to it, WWE President Nick Khan joined Matthew Belloni’s The Town podcast. Khan shared that the deal for Philadelphia to host WrestleMania has been in place for over four years.
This may sound self-contradictory but I try not to be an ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’ guy. This was the last WrestleMania deal that I inherited. So, this deal has been in place for over four years. We’re excited to be going to Philadelphia. We’ll be there April 6th and 7th.
Headlining night one of WrestleMania 40 will be Cody Rhodes and World Heavyweight Champion Seth Rollins taking on Undisputed WWE Universal Champion Roman Reigns and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.
Johnson is a member of the TKO Board of Directors and Khan said that is something they desired. He said there have been conversations with Johnson for years about when he’d come back to WWE. He stated that Johnson always wanted to figure out ‘the why’.
Ari (Emanuel), Dwayne (Johnson), others, Brad Slater who’s an agent there (at WME) I like a ton. Ari and Brad have been across Dwayne’s business for a long period of time. But the idea of Dwayne and having his input on TKO, which as you just articulated is part WWE, was something we were desirous of. So in having an ongoing dialogue with Dwayne over the last two-plus years about, ‘When are you gonna come back?’ It finally made sense to him. ‘The why’, he would always say. ‘I need to figure out the why,’ the why, the why. I think the interesting part for him is he’s developed all of these other businesses and now he sits on the Board of a publicly traded company that has, in my opinion, an incredibly strong valuation and that’s great for him and it’s great for us that we can have him back on camera, in the ring doing what he does.
In the same interview, he weighed in on the sex trafficking allegations against Vince McMahon and if it could have impacted WWE’s deal with Netflix. POST Wrestling’s article on the subject can be found here.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit The Town with Matthew Belloni with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
