With the recently announced news that The Endeavor Group have purchased WWE many have thought and speculated on if any talent and employee layoffs will occur as WWE and UFC will be merged into a new publicly traded company.
After the purchase of WWE was announced, Endeavor COO Mark Shapiro stated that employee layoffs would happen since Endeavor already has people in departments that can handle things at certain WWE departments.
Obviously, with the statement by Mark Shapiro many started to speculate what exactly this will mean for not only employees but also talent whenever WWE does begin its budget cuts. If some remember correctly, the last big wave of budget cuts saw the likes of Karrion Kross, Scarlett, Bray Wyatt, among others released.
While speaking to Lightshed Live. WWE CEO NIck Khan gave some insight on what to expect from the incoming cuts with a rough estimate.
“If you look at what Endeavor was able to take out, cost-wise, from the UFC in 2016 or shortly after the deal was done, we have the same expectation here. We think 50 million is a really conservative number. We have integration teams now. We are going to get those in shape. I think we’ll have a better sense of it in a month or two. We’re going to be pretty aggressive with them to make sure that; for our shareholders and for our company, our organization is as lean and mean as possible, and we are going to rely on the Endeavor flywheel to make up for the rest.”
Let’s all hope that these cuts are overblown and no one loses their job. To the ones who are not so fortunate, we are in a new wave of wrestling. One where you as a talent have so many opportunities to continue the dream of performing as companies like Prestige, West Coast Pro, Circle 6 among others are available to work along with the other big three companies like IMPACT Wrestling, AEW, and NJPW.
As of this writing, no cuts have been announced. We’ll keep you updated on this story as it develops.
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