For months, a sale of WWE has led to speculation affecting the company’s stock price with one of the rumored suitors being Endeavor, which owns the UFC.
Endeavor president Mark Shapiro was a guest on The Town podcast with host Matt Belloni and was asked about the comparisons between the two promotions and if the company would be interested in buying WWE.
We’ve shown the street (Wall Street) and frankly, everybody else in the industry that cares, what we can do when you put the UFC on top of the Endeavor platform. There are just all kinds of levers we can flip.
When it comes to WWE? Yes, that would be something interesting and it would be worth exploring. Would we buy it? Who knows? Last time I checked; it isn’t for sale. But is it something we’re interested in? We are interested in anything in the owned sports properties segment.
Shapiro emphasized the heavy demand for “events and experiences” coming out of the pandemic.
Shapiro was very confident that Netflix will be getting into live sports, which will be big if we’re talking about a streaming landscape where Netflix and Amazon are aggressively going after live sports rights and competing with linear outlets for those rights. The more options at the table for WWE, and to a lesser extent AEW, the better to drive up demand.
