The City of San Antonio gave WWE more than $500,000 in value, including a $250,000 cash site fee, to bring the Royal Rumble to the Alamodome in 2023, according to government records obtained by Wrestlenomics. The exact value was estimated ahead of time to be $546,710.74. Ultimately, San Antonio submitted expenses totaling $575,415.98 to the Texas Governor’s Office for reimbursement.
That dollar figure is on par with the $500,000 reportedly provided to WWE by the St. Pete-Clearwater tourism organization for Royal Rumble earlier this year, just outside Tampa. The return to the local economy is multiple times the investment if economic impact studies commissioned by interested parties can be believed. While touting it won the bid for this year’s Rumble, the St. Pete-Clearwater organization told media that the San Antonio event the year prior provided local economic benefits totaling $69 million. After this year’s Rumble, the same organization said it returned $47 million to the area near Tampa.
TKO executives have routinely named site fees paid by local governments as a major growth opportunity for the parent company of WWE and UFC.
Public knowledge of WWE’s site fees is limited as TKO doesn’t disclose those details in its public filings. Las Vegas will pay $5 million for Wrestlemania next year, about ten times the going rate for WWE’s second-biggest annual event. Vegas paid $300,000 for Summerslam in 2021, plus covering another $30,000 in marketing costs. Puerto Rico paid $1.5 million for Backlash in 2023, plus free use of the venue. Cardiff provided about $2.8 million for Clash at the Castle in 2022. $5.2 million in costs and fees were covered for Wrestlemania in 2022 in Arlington.
After months of effort to obtain the contract between WWE and San Antonio, the document was released to us on Friday in response to our public records request to the Office of the Governor.
Read the documents for yourself:
- Alamodome License Agreement: 2023 Royal Rumble, executed Sept. 6, 2022 (embedded above)
- Texas Attorney General’s ruling letter, Apr. 28, 2023
- Texas Attorney General’s ruling letter, Jan. 17, 2024
- WWE’s petition against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, filed Feb. 16, 2024
- Texas Attorney General’s ruling letter, Jul. 25, 2024
The agreement’s release has been the subject of multiple reviews from the Texas Attorney General, with both WWE and the San Antonio government claiming the contract constituted a trade secret.
Additionally, whether the contract should be published is the central issue of a lawsuit WWE filed against the Attorney General’s Office in February. That lawsuit, as of Tuesday, is still ongoing, despite the release of the agreement by the Governor’s Office.
On Monday we emailed WWE and its attorney for the case, asking if the lawsuit will continue, and if so, for what purpose. We’ll update this report if they respond.
San Antonio first argued in March 2023 to the state Attorney General that publishing the WWE agreement would hurt the city’s ability to compete for similar events.
“[T]he City regularly competes against other venues nationwide for both the ability to host WWE events and other high-profile events at the Alamodome,” which is owned and operated by the city. “In such highly competitive selection processes, the City’s competitors would gain a tremendous advantage if they gained access to [the venue contract related to Royal Rumble 2023] requested by Mr. Thurston. Disclosing such details, including event-specific pricing structures and revenue splits, could give an advantage to any of the City’s competitors and result in another municipality, organization or facility undercutting the City’s future bids and taking its business.”
The first of three rulings from the Attorney General came more than a year ago, on Apr. 28, 2023. The Assistant AG who ruled on the case found the city’s arguments persuasive:
“[W]e find you have demonstrated the city has specific marketplace interests and may be considered a ‘competitor’ for purposes of” the exception to the Texas Public Information Act that allows certain information related to competition or bidding to be withheld. “We also find you have demonstrated release of the submitted information would give advantage to a competitor or bidder.”
Records disclosing the 2023 Rumble’s ticket sales and attendance were released to us earlier, though, by San Antonio and reported on by this outlet at the time. The event drew a $7.3 million gate from 44,569 tickets sold. The announced attendance of 51,338 was exaggerated at WWE’s urging to include capacities of empty suites and security personnel outside, emails between WWE and Alamodome personnel indicated. Due to the AG’s ruling, information about the site fee wasn’t released.
It seemed like that was the end of the story. But the issue of publishing WWE’s contract with the Alamodome, which would disclose the site fee and other incentives, came before the Attorney General again when the contract was requested by an organization doing research for a plaintiff suing WWE. That request was possibly related to the MLW antitrust lawsuit against WWE, but MLW CEO Court Bauer denied knowledge of the request when we asked him about it in February.
The AG reviewed again whether the contract should be released and, on Jan. 17, reversed its previous ruling.
The same Assistant AG who made the earlier ruling, Michelle Garza, wrote that the contract actually didn’t meet the exception related to competitive bidding because the law says that exception doesn’t apply to records related to government spending “for a parade, concert, or other entertainment event paid for in whole or part with public funds,” a description that seems to fit the Royal Rumble event.
Still, WWE had also argued the contract shouldn’t be released, claiming the agreement met the law’s exceptions both as a trade secret and as proprietary information, and that the wrestling company would suffer “substantial competitive harm.”
But the AG ruled that those arguments from WWE failed, pointing to the section of the law that says contracting information, with few exceptions, must be released.
“Upon review, we find the submitted information is either subject to section 552.0222(b) [the section of the law specifying that contracting information must be disclosed] or WWE has failed to provide specific factual evidence demonstrating the information at issue is confidential under section 552.110(b) or section 552.110(c) [the sections of the law that defines cases in which trade secrets and proprietary information may be withheld from disclosure].”
“The submitted information must be released,” the ruling concluded.
The lawsuit related to the request had been settled since the request — consistent with the timing of the MLW-WWE antitrust settlement — but because there was an earlier requestor, namely, this outlet, the information therefore had to be released by San Antonio to Wrestlenomics within 30 days. The only step WWE could take to stop the release of the contract was to sue the AG. So they did.
Does the contract reveal what WWE said it would?
On Feb. 16, WWE filed a petition against Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office. The lawsuit alleged that the contract now published in this report contains trade secrets, which the Texas Publication Information Act allows to be withheld.
WWE’s attorneys from Holland Knight also argued the contract contained proprietary information that also gets a legal pass from having to be released, including because the document “details the names of individual WWE employees and… information about the WWE’s pricing methodology, internal operations, and negotiated terms, among other things.”
“This internal information pertains to the our [sic] financial terms with venues, ticketing information, and staffing details, including names of employees,” WWE’s Executive Vice President of Talent Relations and Head of Global Communications, Chris Legentil wrote in a sworn declaration that was part of the petition. “The Agreement reveals WWE’s proposed percentage splits, fee structures, waivers and reimbursements to the venue, and comparables, and the Royal Rumble’s estimated value and economic impact.”
“If this information was made publicly available and Brandon Thurston was permitted to publicize our financial information and negotiated terms on Wrestlenomics, WWE would lose our bargaining power in negotiating all of our live events and much of the value of a bidding process for venues,” Legentil’s declaration concluded.
The text of the contract reflects some of WWE’s descriptions of it in the petition. In other respects, the company seems to have overstated what’s in the agreement.
To WWE’s claim that “proposed percentage splits” and “fee structures” are in the agreement, the contract does show that the city got a small cut of ticket sales: 50 cents per ticket to help cover transit services and traffic safety costs; $3 per ticket to help offset operational and maintenance costs; and $2 per ticket as a ticket service fee. The average ticket sold for $164.
WWE also gave the city 15% of the sales of “novelties” which seems to refer to all WWE venue merchandise sales.
In exchange, the city provided the $250,000 site fee and covered many other costs including the production expenses required for the setup and tear down of the event, security, ambulance services, catering, telecommunication services, and other costs.
It’s unclear what WWE refers to when it says “comparables” are revealed in the contract. That word doesn’t appear in the text. We wrote to Legentil and WWE’s attorney Tricia DeLeon on Monday, asking for clarification but have yet to hear back.
Despite WWE’s claim that the document “details the names of individual WWE employees,” the only employee name in the contract is that of former Live Events EVP John Porco, because he was WWE’s signatory to the agreement. Porco reportedly left the company in February.
The estimated value of the Royal Rumble could be surmised from the terms of the agreement, but the contract doesn’t clearly define the Royal Rumble as having a specific monetary value or economic impact. As mentioned, a specific dollar value of the economic impact for San Antonio of this specific event was revealed by the St. Pete-Clearwater tourism board in media reports this year, $69 million. That report was published on Jan. 29, more than two weeks before WWE filed its petition, which included the economic value of the Royal Rumble as information that needed to be withheld to prevent harm to the company.
How the 2023 Royal Rumble contract was finally publicly released
In the course of learning more about WWE events that have benefited from government subsidies, I learned more about the Texas Governor’s Office’s Event Trust Funds Program. WWE benefited from that program previously for Wrestlemania events in Dallas and Arlington in 2016 and 2022. I realized it was likely then that the Royal Rumble in San Antonio also benefited from the program. And if so, the Governor’s Office — not just the City of San Antonio — had records related to the 2023 Rumble.
So I sent the Governor’s Office a records request on Apr. 20. I noted for transparency that the information at issue was the subject of a lawsuit.
Unsurprisingly, the issue went to AG review again.
WWE, the Governor’s Office, and San Antonio all argued to the AG that the contract shouldn’t be released. They cited not only the same exceptions that were previously rejected but new ones for the AG to consider.
The Governor’s Office argued the contract met the common law privacy exception because the release of the agreement would be “highly intimate or embarrassing, the publication of which would be highly objectionable to a reasonable person and… not of legitimate public concern.”
This exception is usually applied to information like medical records or marital or divorce records. Or personal — but usually not business — financial information. The 1976 Texas Supreme Court case the Governor’s Office cited, Industrial Foundation of the South v. Texas Industrial Accident Board, concerned medical information and the names and addresses of injured workers.
WWE’s attorneys agreed and wrote to the AG that common law privacy applied to the company’s contract with San Antonio.
“The financial terms WWE seeks to protect fall within this common law standard,” DeLeon wrote, representing WWE. “The terms represent crucial negotiated information that would expose WWE in future negotiations with other parties and reveal closely held financial information about a private company. Further, these negotiated terms are not of legitimate concern to the public. The requestor in this case [Wrestlenomics] is interested only in uncovering WWE’s private information, not in pursuing transparency from a governing body.”
I submitted a letter to the AG for Wrestlenomics in response, denying WWE’s attorney’s claim that this outlet was not pursuing governmental transparency.
I wrote: “Reporting what San Antonio paid for the ‘Royal Rumble’ is crucial for the citizens and taxpayers of San Antonio and potentially for all Texans if state funds were used. Transparency in event pricing benefits municipalities and citizens more broadly, who may negotiate with WWE for future events.”
The latest ruling was completed on Jul. 25 by Assistant Attorney General Anastasia Broadfoot.
“We note common-law privacy protects the interests of individuals, not those of corporate and other business entities,” Broadfoot wrote in her ruling.
She allowed the Governor’s Office to withhold certain information referred to in non-public exhibits unavailable to us by nature of the review process.
“However, we find WWE has failed to demonstrate that any of the remaining information is highly intimate or embarrassing and of no legitimate public interest,” Broadfoot’s ruling stated. “Accordingly, the governor’s office may not withhold any portion of the remaining information under section 552.101 of the Government Code in conjunction with common-law privacy on behalf of WWE.”
When we asked for the release of the information from the Governor’s Office’s Public Information Coordinator, Assistant General Counsel Kieran Hillis, he initially said that on Aug. 8, he would provide us with the documents that were ordered to be released. But on Aug. 8, Hillis wrote to us again by email saying, “We are unable to determine whether certain documents responsive to your request may be lawfully released based upon [the Jul. 25 ruling],” and that his office needed to seek clarification from the AG.
Last Friday, the last business day before the Governor’s Office would have surpassed the 30-day limit within which it would either have to release the information or the office or WWE would have to sue the Attorney General, Hillis sent us a PDF that included the contract.
We contacted Legentil, DeLeon, and the City of San Antonio to request comments for this report. We’ll update this article if they respond.
Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.