How WWE Handles Paying Wrestlers During Coronavirus

It’s what matters the most to a company. At the end of the day, WWE is a business, meaning that they are all about making money. While fans see it as a form of entertainment, WWE is out to make their profits as high as possible. This can be done in a variety of ways, but they are currently using a bit of an accounting trick to keep their expenses a bit lower.

WWE has a lot of expenses that go into running a wrestling company, with paying the wrestlers being near the top of the list. It’s pretty simple: without wrestlers, you don’t have a wrestling company. Earlier this month, WWE got rid of several of its wrestlers, meaning that the company’s payroll went down quite a bit. However, that isn’t the only way they are keeping that number as low as they have.

According to Wrestling Observer Radio, WWE’s payroll is low at the moment due to the company not running any live events. Since WWE is currently only running their three regular television shows per week, wrestlers are only being paid if they work. WWE wrestlers are signed with a downside guarantee, meaning that should they not be paid a certain amount based on appearances or merchandise royalties, WWE will pay them the balance of their downside guarantee.

It’s a complicated situation. Check out how WWE handles contracts:

Opinion: This is one of those situations where WWE will have to pay in the end, but it makes sense for them to try and hold off as long as they can in the hopes that things get better. They are missing a large chunk of their income at the moment and it isn’t going to be easy to make things work for the time being. Hopefully everything works out, because it could get more complicated if this keeps going for such a long time.

How long can WWE hold out like this? How much trouble could they be in? Let us know in the comments below.

Thomas Hall has been a wrestling fan for over thirty years and has seen over 50,000 wrestling matches. He has also been a wrestling reviewer since 2009 with over 5,000 full shows covered. You can find his work at kbwrestlingreviews.com, or check out his- Amazon author page with 30 wrestling books. Get the latest and greatest in professional wrestling news by signing up for our daily email newsletter. Just look below for “GET EXCLUSIVE UPDATES” to sign up. Thank you for reading!