Will the dead periods on the sports calendar soon be a thing of the past? That was on Bill Simmons’s mind this week when he sat down with WWE CEO Nick Khan this week.
Now that the TKO Holdings merger is complete and the WWE and UFC are under the same roof, Simmons asked if the company could circle times outside of football season for what he described as “a mega-weekend.”
“So the conversations are just beginning now,” Khan responded. “Everybody wanted to make sure that we got all the regulatory approvals in place.”
The conversations that are just getting started might be about particulars. It sounds like Khan and his colleagues have already recognized that there is an opening for TKO to embraces something like what Simmons described.
“What everyone envisions is can you set up an all star TKO weekend where if Smackdown goes on Friday and the UFC goes on Saturday with the pay-per-view and WWE goes with a premium live event on Sunday. Can you do that from the same city? Certainly a lot of cost efficiencies there in terms of production, but a lot of revenue efficiencies in terms of upside, we think, there as well.”
Those efficiencies are where some of the preliminary discussions have taken place. Khan said that he does not expect a talent crossover to happen regularly, but he says the producers of UFC and WWE events have had conversations about how crossover events could work.
“Hopefully we have some news on that in a couple of months,” Khan concluded.
