Heading into WrestleMania 40 two years ago, WWE could do no wrong. Triple H was calling the shots with WWE creative, and it felt like a breath of fresh air after Vince McMahon had spent years running the product into the ground.
However, fans have cooled on WWE over the past year or so. They've also been vocal about criticisms with booking, creative decisions, and the sheer number of adverts that dominate the product (WrestleMania 42 Night 1 devoted more minutes to commercials than matches).
During an interview with the Sports Business Journal, recorded on April 15 at the CAA World Congress of Sports in Los Angeles, WWE President Nick Khan was asked about taking WrestleMania 43 to Saudi Arabia and the complaints from fans.
"We’re doing WrestleMania next year in Saudi Arabia, for the first time ever, WrestleMania will be outside of the United States or Canada, and we’ve had a big fruitful partnership with them," he started. "We realised years ago we can’t simply pipe out American content internationally. You've got to be boots on the ground, and if you look at our revenue from international now, it’s substantially greater than it was five and a half years ago."
"I’ve never read X or Twitter as it relates to our business. That is a vocal minority," Khan stated. "We don’t adjust our business based on complaints; we adjust our business based on ratings, revenue, and relevancy."
Returning to that point, he added, "We will never respond to social media criticism. Again, if ratings are down, if revenue is down, if relevancy is down, it’s up to us."
The words "tone deaf" come to mind. Still, the most baffling part of the interview saw Khan contradict comments from Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Triple H, Cody Rhodes, and more about how social media backlash forced WWE to pivot from The Rock vs. Roman Reigns at WrestleMania 40 back to Rhodes vs. Reigns II.
"The plan was always how it ended up in Philly two years ago," he claimed. "Sometimes it’s a predetermined outcome in wrestling. You want to throw the fans off, you want to let things bake, and then boom, it ends up the way we wanted it to end up. It never changed. That was just online rumors and gossip that we were changing."
In many respects, this interview is indicative of what's wrong with WWE at the moment. Regardless, you can hear more from Khan in the player below.