WWE’s announced attendances were down to a similar degree as WrestleTix estimates of tickets distributed, this year versus last year. On a percentage basis, it appears the company was fairly honest about the difference.
WrestleTix estimates of the ticket maps suggest attendance in the same stadium in Las Vegas, Allegiant Stadium, was down between 15% and 17%. WrestleTix estimated 50,081 for Saturday and 52,011 for Sunday. That’s down from last year’s numbers of 60,151 and 61,389.
WWE, meanwhile, announced 50,816 and 55,255, for Saturday and Sunday, respectively. That’s down 17% and 13%, respectively, from what the company announced for last year’s events.
WrestleTix estimates do not include suites. It’s unclear if WWE’s announced attendance takes those attendees into account or what WWE’s numbers are based on.
Allegiant Stadium is controlled by the Las Vegas Stadium Authority, which discloses attendance data quarterly, so I expect data to be included in their quarterly report in August later this year. For last year, LVSA listed attendances of 58,538 for Saturday and 60,103 for Sunday. It’s unclear what specific category of attendance those numbers reflected, whether that’s tickets sold, tickets distributed (sales and comps), tickets used (aka “scan count”, or “turnstile count”). I asked the LVSA’s media representative to clarify when reporting on that data last year and the organization didn’t respond. The LVSA’s number is likely not the number of tickets sold, because live event trade Pollstar lists the two-day total for last year’s WrestleMania as 113,412. The LVSA numbers total a higher number, 118,641.
Last year’s WrestleMania broke all live event gate records in pro wrestling history, totaling $66 million, or about $33 million each day. Even adjusting for inflation, those two events are #1 and #2 in pro wrestling history for ticket sales revenue. Gates for this year’s WrestleMania events aren’t currently known.
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Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.
All data sourced here again from WrestleTix estimates of tickets distributed (sales, plus comps).
Ticket distribution for WrestleMania this weekend is about 9,000 lower than last year’s events with a similar number of days remaining.
WWE’s side of the story appeared to be relayed to Sports Business Journal on Tuesday. SBJ reported: “A source close to WWE said ticket sales have surged in recent weeks and projected that the event remains headed toward one of the top gates in WWE history.”
The point about the gate being among WWE’s highest ever is virtually certain, given elevated ticket prices and having moved about 40,000 each night already. The notion, however, that “ticket sales have surged in recent weeks” seems to suggest unusually high ticket sales, which isn’t well-supported by WrestleTix data. The analysis of ticket maps from WrestleTix only shows the usual trajectory of movement in ticket sales as the event date approaches. But has there been an increase in movement as the event draws nearer, as there almost always is for events generally? Sure.
WrestleMania Saturday: 2025 vs. 2026
WrestleMania Sunday: 2025 vs. 2026
Data table
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More than one person has asked today about WrestleMania ticket movement this year versus last year, so here’s a visual representation.
The two-day event is in the same stadium as last year (Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas) which is somewhat helpful for eliminating externalities.
Of course, here we are not accounting for any differences there may be in ticket prices (which we don’t have good data on) and how much one wants to factor in the unusual fact that WrestleMania is in the same city this year as last year.
All data here relies on WrestleTix estimates of tickets distributed (sales, plus comps).
This year’s WrestleMania:
For Night 1, last estimate with 12 days to go was 39,292.
For Night 2, last estimate with 13 days to go was 41,260.
Last year’s WrestleMania with a similar (slightly more) amount of time to go…
For Night 1, with 14 days to go was at 48,621.
For Night 2, with 15 days to go was at 51,044.
So this year is down by about 19% from the prior year at a similar point.
It should be noted that last year’s WrestleMania drew the biggest two individual pro wrestling gates of all-time, even adjusting for inflation: around $33 million each night (as reported for POST Wrestling here).
Given the ticket prices at least early on, this year’s WrestleMania will probably still be among the highest pro wrestling gates ever, though, reaching the record of last year seems very doubtful at this point.
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Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.
In the second annual iteration of this study (see last year’s here), sentiment toward AEW improved in 2025 while sentiment toward WWE declined, based on an updated analysis of discussion on Reddit’s largest wrestling forum, r/SquaredCircle, which has nearly 1 million weekly visitors.
The 2025 data is a reversal for AEW, whose sentiment had been in decline on the subreddit since peaking in mid-2022.
This analysis made use of more than 600,000 comments from 2025 alone and a total of more than 5.7 million comments across a timeline of just over seven years, displayed in the charts below. The methodology will be detailed further in this article.
Wrestling fan sentiment, quantified here at scale, is often dismissed as fickle or unrepresentative. We don’t need to resolve or discount that issue to nonetheless consider the trajectory of the sentiment values demonstrated here over a long course of time. Even if the sentiment of a subreddit is discountable as a mass-market indicator — which it may well be — the change in that sentiment across millions of data points suggests a change in how products are processed by its core audience.
That being said, while we found last year a more mathematically significant correlation between live event attendance and sentiment with a set of quarterly data points, that correlation weakened with the addition of data from 2025.
However, it’s worth noting that, according to WrestleTix estimates, Dynamite’s average attendances showed signs of improvement in 2025. After many quarters of year-over-year declines in average estimated tickets distributed, Dynamite slightly improved in the second and fourth quarters of 2025 (up 8% and 6%, respectively). The first and third quarters were down severely, still (-34% and -35%, respectively). Possibly more in line with the data observed here, the first quarter of 2026, which just ended, saw Dynamite attendances up 15% from the prior year. Collision attendance, though, continued to sink year-over-year.
TV ratings are difficult to analyze given changes to Nielsen’s methodology in recent months but viewership for both Dynamite and Collision (though not the P18-49 audience) is up year-over-year so far in 2026.
Ultimately, what has been a largely negative story for the direction of AEW attendances and TV ratings from 2022 to 2024, has more recently become a more positive but still mixed story.
Picking up where this study left off at the end of 2024, throughout 2025, discussion mentioning AEW subjects became more positive, parting ways from what was essentially a tie between WWE and AEW sentiment throughout 2024 and most of 2023.
Sentiment related to WWE, meanwhile, declined somewhat throughout 2025, the opposite direction from AEW’s recovering trend.
Note that the data collected and charted here ends with December 31, 2025, and does not extend into 2026.
The wider history of the data here favors AEW, despite it being a distant second to WWE in terms of basically every economic indicator. AEW, nonetheless, solidified its place as the #2 wrestling company in the U.S. as it renewed its crucial media rights deal with WBD, which became active upon the beginning of 2025, paying AEW somewhere between $170 million to $185 million annually through at least 2027.
Discussion on r/SquaredCircle about WWE appeared to be considerably heavier than AEW. Through 2025, there were just under 40,000 comments per month that this study identified as exclusively mentioning our selected WWE keywords. That contrasts against comments with AEW selected keywords (and no WWE keywords), which actually declined as the year went on: from just over 17,000 comments per month early in the year to around 10,000 by the end of 2025.
Unsurprisingly, April, the month when Wrestlemania took place, was the peak month for WWE comments.
The peak for comment volume for AEW was during July and August, the months during and right after All In, the company’s biggest show of the year.
Methodology (largely repeated from last year’s article on this subject)
Data for ostensibly every comment in r/SquaredCircle’s archive through the end of December 2025 is available through Academic Torrents, which this study relied on. Academic Torrents is a non-profit data-sharing platform that hosts large public datasets, not limited to Reddit data, for academic and research use. The website is supported by university researchers and is used in many academic studies.
I started this study by downloading an extremely large JSON file that contained comments posted to the subreddit from 2012 through 2025.
For this project, in favor of focusing on recent wrestling history since the introduction of All Elite Wrestling, October 1, 2018, was selected as the starting point, so that we could account for any early discussions related to what would become All Elite Wrestling, even though AEW wasn’t formally introduced to the public until a few months later.
The keywords used to identify AEW- and WWE-related comments were carefully but arbitrarily chosen to focus on the companies themselves, their executive leaders, and their major branded programs, rather than attempting to catalog every wrestler or personality.
To avoid ambiguity, as each comment’s sentiment was analyzed as a whole and not in part, any comments that contained a keyword from both the WWE and the AEW lists were not included in the data analyzed here.
In the cases of “rampage” and “collision”, those words were only counted beginning on June 1, 2021, and April 1, 2023, respectively, just a few months before those AEW television programs debuted. Including these words earlier may have caused comments to be erroneously identified as AEW-related.
Adjustments also had to be made for keywords “collision”, “forbidden door”, and “dynamite”. The former two inherently carried a general negative value (think “forbidden” having a negative connotation) and “dynamite” carried an inherent positive value. All WWE keywords and all other AEW keywords used in this study had a neutral inherent value.
VADER (which stands for Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner) is a rule-based sentiment analysis tool that’s specifically designed for social media text that often consists of short comments and informal language. VADER assigns each comment a compound score, ranging from -1.00 (extremely negative) to +1.00 (extremely positive) based on the presence of words and phrases found in VADER’s manually curated sentiment dictionary, combined with intensity modifiers like punctuation and capitalization.
In simpler terms, VADER has a list of thousands of words that people usually think of as positive or negative. For example, words like “great” or “amazing” make a given score higher. Words like “terrible” or “boring” lower the score. The tool also accounts for things like exclamation points, all caps, or adverbs like “very” that are used to express stronger feelings. All the words in a given comment were taken into account and their sentiment values added up (hence “compound score”) to decide whether a sentence measured as positive, negative, or neutral overall.
Brandon Thurston has written about wrestling business since 2015. He operates and owns Wrestlenomics.
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Happy 3/16, which of course means it’s Freedom of Information Day.
Since the 1980s, and adopted in a proclamation by Ronald Reagan in 1988, March 16 celebrates this day coinciding with the birthday of James Madison, who once wrote:
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
Source: Library of Congress (James Madison letter to William T. Barry, Aug. 4, 1822)
Colloquially, most people know “FOIA” as the catch-all for government transparency. But the federal Freedom of Information Act pertains specifically to U.S. federal agencies and is just one important law intended to allow citizens to understand government business. A wide variety of laws actually allow the public to request and obtain records from agencies.
All 50 U.S. states, plus other jurisdictions like the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, have state-level FOIA-style laws under various names.
These laws help make important information available for many areas of citizenship and journalism. Pro wrestling isn’t an obvious place to find consequential government business, but that is increasingly the case. Particularly as WWE and AEW seek government subsidies funded by tax revenue, a democratic government arguably by definition has an obligation, with few exceptions, to disclose to the public the nature of those dealings.
The agencies and pro wrestling companies themselves sometimes resist such legally-required disclosures. In my reporting I’ve encountered some classic examples of the tension between public and private business. Wrestling companies want the benefits of government relations but not the disclosure requirements that come with doing business in democratic societies. That is to say, WWE and AEW want government money (or other government benefits) but they would prefer not to have to comply with the release of their records, which end up in the possession of the government agencies when such business is conducted.
WWE, for example, in 2024 sued the Texas Attorney General’s Office to prevent the release of information when the AG ruled that certain records with the City of San Antonio related to Royal Rumble 2023 had to be turned over. To make a long story short (which you can read more about in past reporting here), I requested the same information from another agency, the AG reviewed it again, WWE did not prevail in withholding the information, and they dropped their suit against the AG.
AEW, too, is sensitive to the release of its information. Since at least 2024, the following provision has appeared in some of its venue contracts, which is evidently targeted at preventing the release of event attendance information.
CONFIDENTIALITY: The information pertaining to the business of the LICENSEE [AEW], Venue, and all contracted third parties, including but not limited to information regarding the provisions of this Agreement, attendance figures, turnstile or drop counts, ticket numbers (sold, comped, or redeemed), revenues, box office receipts, and any other related or similar numbers, fees, deal terms with the Acts, or the business affairs of the other contracted third parties contain trade secrets and comprise “Confidential Information” and the parties agree to not disseminate, by any means, such Confidential Information to anyone other than LICENSEE.
Some forms of AEW’s “confidentiality” provision in its venue contracts go further, getting a commitment from the venue that it will “assist in seeking the Lessee [AEW] to keep such information protected under trade secret laws.”
Given AEW and other wrestling companies’ practice of publicly volunteering attendance claims and other live event information for promotional purposes, the notion that AEW’s attendance information could be rightly interpreted as a trade secret in the context of public records law is dubious. And despite this provision, I’ve yet to have a problem obtaining attendance and ticket sales information for events at government venues even when a provision like the one above appeared, which further raises questions about the viability of that provision in cases where AEW runs government-controlled venues.
Source: Box Office Statement for AEW Collision (it is labeled “Dynamite” despite the event being for a live broadcast of Collision on that date), Nov. 15, 2025, obtained by Wrestlenomics from the Erie County Convention Authority.
Wherever I believe it’s viable, I’m committed to obtaining information that helps the public understand — not just the business performance of the wrestling promotions I cover, but more importantly — the nature of these for-profit companies’ dealings with entities that are supposed to serve the public. This doesn’t mean that I presume there’s wrongdoing involved with these relationships or subsidies. But it means that where the people’s money or assets (like venues) are used, the people should be allowed to know the details, so citizens can assess whether these are good practices that benefit the public.
Where compelling the release of such records means appealing to an Attorney General or even suing an agency that is refusing to comply with the law, I am prepared to do that, and in some cases have done exactly that. I’ve taken those actions primarily as a self-represented non-lawyer, while never accepting legal services from any subject I cover. That means I’m writing letters, appeals, petitions, or other filings myself, against either internal legal teams or well-trained outside counsel.
Such actions compelling records rightfully into public visibility extend beyond the executive branches of governments and into courts of law. In the ongoing WWE shareholder lawsuit in the Delaware Court of Chancery, where the defendants — some of the most powerful people in the history of professional wrestling — are represented by lead counsel from two of the biggest law firms in the country (Latham & Watkins and Kirkland & Ellis), as well as local counsel from boutique Delaware firms. Despite that apparent disadvantage, our reporting unearthed newsworthy facts that further the public’s understanding of a major publicly-traded company’s M&A process and shed light as well on the related judicial process itself.
If you value this kind of reporting and are able, consider signing up to be a paid member on Patreon, or on Substack. You’ll get access to our paywalled reporting on the business of wrestling, as well as alerts when my new reporting goes up on POST Wrestling. Your subscription fees support Wrestlenomics’ operating expenses and my time, but also the costs related to records requests, court filing fees, and document production fees we’re charged in the course of this reporting.
Wrestling TV ratings have largely rebounded after Nielsen reportedly implemented an adjustment to its Big Data + Panel methodology for cable programs, beginning Jan. 26. The change has reversed much of the double-digit declines WWE and AEW programs experienced since the new measurement system was fully launched on Sept. 26, 2025.
The decline under Big Data + Panel for wrestling was particularly strong in key age demographics that serve as the currency that advertisers buy against. That’s critical because ad buys are a major part of what justifies WWE and AEW receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in rights fees annually from their U.S. television partners. While the wrestling companies and networks mostly declined to comment, as we reported last November, NXT’s broadcaster, CW, strongly criticized what the network said was Nielsen’s lack of transparency since the new methodology became primary.
Under Big Data + Panel, before the Jan. 26 change, WWE Smackdown on USA Network averaged 1,095,000 viewers and a 0.26 P18-49 rating. In the four episodes since Jan. 26, however, Smackdown has averaged 1,219,000 and 0.30. That improvement is despite the two most-recent episodes airing on lower-profile network Syfy.
AEW Dynamite on TBS, under the new system, from late September to late January, averaged 503,000 viewers and a 0.09 P18-49 rating, excluding a preemption that was lower. Since then, Dynamite averaged 651,000 and 0.12.
AEW Collision in its normal 8 p.m. time slot on TNT went from 246,000 viewers and a 0.04 P18-49 rating to 478,000 and 0.08. It roughly doubled. The latter averages include the heavily hyped “Grand Slam” episode that aired on Feb. 14. The average is only slightly lower if you exclude it and average only the other three episodes: 450,000 and 0.08.
As far as we know, the methodology adjustment that began on Jan. 26 wasn’t applied to broadcast, meaning it doesn’t affect NXT on over-the-air network CW. Nonetheless, NXT is also up in total viewership, though, not in the key ad demo, viewers aged 18 to 49. From late September to late January, NXT averaged 594,000 viewers and a 0.09 P18-49 rating. Since then, it’s averaged 671,000 viewers and an equal 0.09.
Big Data + Panel measured most telecasts more favorably; wrestling was in the minority
Below we’ll be focusing primarily on the period before January 26, before Nielsen adjusted the Big Data + Panel methodology.
Our report from November presented measurements for telecasts under both the old “panel-only” methodology, compared to those same airings measured by the Big Data + Panel, showing that Smackdown, NXT, Dynamite, and Collision were all heavily impacted, despite the old system still measuring the same episodes more favorably.
It’s important to note that the chart below (and the chart that follows it) is based on all data available from SpoilerTV from Sept. 22 through Jan. 25, but there are many dates that are missing. We have 120 of the 154 dates in that time span, or 78% of the dates in the period, meaning 34 dates (22%) are missing. Nonetheless, this is the most complete view we were able to put together to consider how Nielsen’s new methodology affected the measurement of telecasts across the cable TV landscape.
In the chart above, we take a broad look at how differently programs were affected by Big Data + Panel. We gathered 198 different cable program titles that appeared at least 5 times in the data available via SpoilerTV, which includes WWE Smackdown, AEW Dynamite, and AEW Collision.
(If you’re wondering why I didn’t run a chart similar to the one above using P18-49 or P25-54, which are measurements arguably more important to these wrestling programs because they’re tied to ad sales, it’s because data in the ad demos is available only in ratings expressed as decimal points, rounded to the second decimal place. If you follow the data, you know that it’s somewhat rare at this point for a program to measure at more than 0.30 in either demo, so we’re dealing with data that’s relatively close to zero, without a lot of precision, relying on data points which are themselves estimates. That results in less precise comparisons when averaging and calculating differences. Total viewership (P2+) on the other hand is expressed in thousands in the data from SpoilerTV, leaving a lot more room for increments between the value and zero.)
The analysis here affirms the notion that wrestling was among the programs more negatively impacted, with only a handful of those 198 programs seeing similar or worse discrepancies. Again, like our previous study and the updated charts later in this article, this is not a study of viewership before the new methodology and after; this data reflects the very same telecasts measured under both methodologies and compared to one another. The data does in fact show that in some cases, and especially for wrestling programs, the very same telecasts measured significantly differently under panel-only versus Big Data + Panel. It’s also notable that the majority of the 198 program-and-network combinations we isolated here measured higher under the new system, not lower.
We still don’t have a clear explanation for why this discrepancy exists or why wrestling programs in particular were affected.
There are some similarities among the programs that benefited most and those that were diminished most under Big Data + Panel. Those that saw the strongest increases included children’s programming (a lot of Disney and Disney Jr. programs), but there’s still a variety of other telecasts like Spanish language soccer, Cops Reloaded on Reelz, movies, and, yes, Golden Girls reruns on the Hallmark Channel.
On the opposite end, programs that measured much lower under Big Data + Panel included the adult-audience cartoons (Bob’s Burgers, Rick & Morty, Family Guy) and few series on MTV (Untucked 17, RuPaul’s Drag Race, Caught in the Act). But, again, there’s a variety of programs there, too.
Does Big Data + Panel measure very young audiences or Spanish language audiences more heavily and younger adult audiences less heavily? Maybe, but it’s unclear.
There’s also the notion that duration might have something to do with why some programs suffered — possibly because longer programs not coded as sports (like pro wrestling, which is generally coded as entertainment) weren’t granted an exception that prevented extended viewing from being discounted. That seems plausible, and I still wouldn’t rule it out, but our analysis here didn’t find data supporting that idea. I couldn’t find a correlation between program duration and discrepancy under the two methodologies. (The R² comparing duration to the deltas of each of P2+, P18-49, P25-54 across more than 14,000 data points are all rounded to 0.00 — meaning it’s mathematically random.)
But if we look closer, can we see how sports are treated differently than programs probably not categorized as sports? I isolated the data in the same chart above to just those program-and-network combinations that had a duration of 90 minutes or more.
Filtering the data this way, it looks like wrestling was even more of an anomaly in being worse off with Big Data + Panel. Out of 75 programs that met the criteria, there are just 12 whose viewership for the same telecasts measured lower on average under the new methodology versus the old. Smackdown, Dynamite, and Collision are among those 12 — and Smackdown fared the worst, down 14% on average. Joining them on the negative side of the chart are Mind of a Monster on ID (-14%), RuPaul’s Drag Race 18 on MTV (-13%), R&R Picture Shows on VH1 (-11%), MTV’s The Challenge (-8%), Mountain Men on the History Channel (-7%), Big Ten women’s volleyball (-4%), Food Network’s Tournament of Champions: All-Star Christmas (-3%), and movies on Lifetime (-2%).
If longer, non-sports programming were being punished by Big Data, you might expect to see more movies on the negative side of the chart. But the positive side is full of not only sports but movies across a variety of networks, including TruTV, FX Movie Channel, IFC, Lifetime Movie Network, Disney Channel, Bravo, Freeform, AMC, BET, TNT, TBS, BBC America, Paramount, Comedy Central, Hallmark, and more.
If there’s some kind of exception for movies, too, you might expect to see more unscripted or reality shows on the negative side and not on the positive side. But they’re on both, as well. Four incarnations of 90 Day Fiancé on TLC measured positively on average. So did Homestead Rescue on Discovery. A few others measured about equal on average under both methodologies, including, AMC Fearfest, Food Network’s Holiday Baking Championship, and Ancient Aliens on the History Channel.
In short, after you read all this, and I spent far too much time crunching data, the data itself doesn’t give us an obvious answer about what happened to wrestling under Big Data before the adjustment. But starting Jan. 26, the change has largely restored what was lost.
Each episode of the wrestling programs we track in both methodologies
What might be most surprising is that even though wrestling programs have significantly recovered from the initial form of Big Data + Panel, the old methodology is still measuring higher viewership for these telecasts than the updated new methodology. That observation suggests Nielsen’s inclusion of data from the Advertising Research Foundation’s DASH study may have also been applied to the old “panel-only” method as well.
Like our previous report, we don’t have data in the prior methodology for NXT, which is on broadcast TV, not cable, unlike the other wrestling programs considered here.
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