CNBC’s Alex Sherman on Endeavor-WWE-UFC | Pollock & Thurston

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These results are for comparison only and should not be attended on public roads drive responsibly. See me on USA dot com for details. Hello everybody. It is John Pollock and Brandon Thurston for another edition of Pollock and Thurston interview. And we've got Brandon. It's our version of The Big Yet today. Yes, we have a very big yet. We have some people say that Rich Steemboat and Randy Savage stole the show at WrestleMania 3, but it doesn't compare to CNBC stealing the show and Alex Sherman stealing the show in 2023 at WrestleMania. That is it. The big story broken on Sunday by our guest today. CNBC media reporter Alex Sherman who has been so kind to take time out of his vacation though less this week to chat with us about this seismic deal for Endeavor, WWE and the UFC. So Alex, first of all, just tell us where are you vacationing and you have chosen quite the week for a vacation. Yeah, I'm in Hillsborough Beach, Florida. You can even move my screen. You can see the ocean off the window here. I'm here with my family. It's funny. I've got a lot of the reporting for this deal in the lobby of the Miami Open. We were that's that was sort of why we came down here because we got tickets to the finals, both the men's and the women's. And I probably watched 25% of the matches on both Saturday and Sunday because I was making calls from a Miami Open, which I learned over the course of the last 48 hours is actually owned by Endeavor. So that was the irony there. So now the now Endeavor owns both the WWE and the Miami Open. Look at that Endeavor, just a voracious appetite for all things sports and entertainment related. Let's dial this back maybe a couple of weeks ago. And if we were to be talking to you early March, what was sort of your lay of the land of the front runners when it came to the sale talks of WWE and where Endeavor was and what once they got closer to the goal line in the ensuing weeks? I always thought Endeavor was one of the front runners that was mostly based on what it was told really, but logic also, I mean, you figure that Endeavor had had quite a bit of success owning UFC or this is a property that it bought for $4 billion or so. Now in this deal, their value UFC around $12 billion that gives you an indication of the value creation that the UFC has had under Endeavor's ownership. The main reason I thought Endeavor made a lot of sense was I figured if any deal happens, it would probably include Vince McMahon staying with the company. Even though he came out publicly and said I'm willing to walk, I was told by people familiar with the matter that McMahon always wanted to stay with the company. He said that of course because you have to say that, you never know what the deal is and for shareholder purposes, you can't walk into a sale and say, look, I won't take the highest bid because I refuse to leave. But clearly this was WWE's life, it's his baby, he came back to the company. So I figured Endeavor, given the fact that it was owned by Aria Manuel and that they already had a structure in place where Dana White stayed with the UFC, would be a logical home where they could probably figure out a way to keep McMahon involved in the business and that's exactly what we saw. So the one thing I would say is that at the time, I thought some of the big media companies might be interested. Comcast, Disney, Fox, of course Comcast and Disney already have rights deals in place with the WWE. Over the course of the past several months, what I think I realized is that that interest maybe wasn't there. I don't think Comcast was particularly interested. I don't think Disney was ever interested. I don't have a firm up a read on Fox, but clearly not as interested as Endeavor. Yeah, I can see why it wouldn't fit for Fox with Fox being a smaller company these days. But even years ago, thinking about if WWE was ever to be acquired, Comcast slash NBC, you made a lot of sense because NBC was so invested in W programming with RAW, with the network content and NXT and some other programming. Do you have any idea of why NBC Comcast wasn't that interested? Yeah, one may be McMahon at his future involvement. I don't really know how that would fit. Comcast is by and large a conservative cable company at heart. The idea that adding McMahon to the mix may not have worked. But I think the bigger idea about why that was not a fit was Comcast probably has one big shot here from a merger perspective. This is not a great time for media mergers in the sense that the general valuation of the big media companies has come down quite a bit from what it was say in January of last year or before. The year 2022, we saw a major devaluing of all of the large media companies. So the idea that it would spring for a $9 billion acquisition year, Comcast has a couple other things I think that it needs to figure out what it wants to do with any dry powder it has. Maybe it wants to buy Hulu from Disney, the 66% of Hulu that Disney owns, which Bob Iker has come out and said he would potentially be willing to sell. That would be a $20 billion deal or something happened. And of course, everybody speculates that a year from now, perhaps NBC Universal and Warner Brothers discovery would come together to make a bigger company and maybe that's what Brian Roberts wants to do. So in the list of priorities of those three deals, I would put WWE as a long third. So I feel like the company probably just realized like, look, if we have one big shot at a big deal here, this isn't the deal we want to do. And the acquiring WWE would just make it more complicated to do those deals, you think? Yeah, they just, I mean, it would be, it would be money that they wouldn't have anymore because they probably wouldn't have done some sort of equity deal. And equity deal makes a lot of sense with this structure with Endeavour because it's a new company, UFC and WWE combined. But handing Vince McMahon a lot of Comcast stock, I'm not really sure McMahon would want that. And I'm not really sure that that makes a lot of sense for Comcast because it kind of ties McMahon to the company for a while. So if it wasn't that, it would have to have been a cash deal. And I'm not sure investors would have loved the idea of Comcast spending $9 billion in cash or whatever on WWE. It just, from a balance sheet standpoint, that's probably not the best use of the company's money. So how volatile a figure was Vince McMahon in this whole run up? Of course, the scandal of the sexual misconduct allegations were front and center throughout all of this. He has navigated his way back to a very significant power position within the company. At the end of the year, it is not as though the WWE board of directors just instantly wrapped their arms around Vince. There was certainly a contention there. But in the sales talks, it seems already a manual. It was vital that Vince be part of the steal. Was he an outlier in that sense versus others where Vince was going to play a big factor, I think, in a lot of these bidders? Well, good question. I don't know the full answer to that at this stage. I may know more about that as the days go by in terms of just how much of an outlier he was in terms of any other bidders. Because to be honest, I don't have a great sense even yet of who exactly was around the table at the end. The WWE CEO now, Nick Khan, came out in the days before the sale and said there was a robust interest in buying WWE. At this point, other than Nick's word, I can't verify that. I will try to in the coming days to figure out who exactly was there at the end and how much or how little of a factor was McMahon playing into the role of where WWE went. That said, there's no denying the fact that McMahon was out of the company, bullied his way back into the company, and now he's going to play a major role moving forward. He comes out a winner in this in that sense. It looked as though his days may be numbered there, and now not only are his days not numbered, but Aria Manuel again publicly called him basically the key man of this deal, which is what WWE has publicly said, even in all of their business filings, for the last decade plus, like Vince McMahon is one of one from a creative standpoint, from a visionary standpoint. That all seemed to trickle away and certainly in the wrestling community, there has been a lot of chatter about how Triple H does the creative in a way that maybe moves the ball forward, takes WWE in a better direction than Vince McMahon did. McMahon said on CNBC yesterday that he will not get in the weeds again and creative. So theoretically, that relationship where Paul of Esquil continued to run this creative exists, now does anyone fully believe that Vince McMahon will not get in the weeds and creative in this new structure? According to reports we heard from last night from last night's Raw, he was very involved in running creative last night. I mean, he's back with the company now. So again, look, again, this is where the logic kicks in, right? He's the majority owner of the company in the previous standpoint. He's executive chairman of the new combined company. He made a deal specifically to stay at the company. The idea that he's going to relax at a beach for the next, you know, X amount of years, never made any sense. And I certainly don't think that's going to be something that logically makes sense moving forward. Yeah, I just hearing from someone directly there in the midst of this last night. It certainly seemed that last night's show Vince was definitely getting the Garden Gloves on at least last night for the night after WrestleMania. But it will remain to be seen. That's a very interesting dynamic now moving forward with Vince McMahon and his son-in-law Paul Levesque at a time when I would say that overall fan interest has been very high and it's been reflected in their television numbers being up year over year with live attendance. They have been on a very hot streak going into WrestleMania and now it's sort of the come down you naturally get after WrestleMania. But I think fans are going to be having their microscopes out now analyzing the programming and seeing any tonal shifts that we see from it. On the side of Endeavour, what do you see as sort of their big picture strategy? It seems that certainly from a parallel standpoint, from running the UFC with the success they have had over the last six and a half years, that that was just a perfect primer to jump into this kind of an acquisition. But what do you see as Endeavour's kind of large-scale view of why this makes sense for them now? I think they had a lot of success with UFC and they feel like they can run the same playbook with WWE. That's certainly what they said publicly. You listened to them over and over again. They talked about this sort of vague concept of a flywheel. I don't really know what that means. But the general idea I think is that Endeavour owns a talent agency. Endeavour owns live events. Endeavour has done multiple media rights deals. They know how to slice and dice media rights really well to maximize the valuation in terms of the money that's going to come through the door for WWE over the next X amount of years. So they'll do new streaming deals. And they talked about maybe doing a new direct-to-consumer offering. And they'll do broadcast deals. And they'll do global deals. And so they figured it out with UFC. They think they can do the same thing with WWE. And now you have a new publicly traded company of both of these entities. Like, so who knows what that will do down the road. Now you've got equity to throw around in a bigger company. Maybe you can buy even more live events on that end. Or ultimately, maybe you can turn around and flip the thing to some media behemoth years down the road. But I think that was the general idea here. It's like, look, we know what we're doing with this. We have leadership in place. We have a lot of tools at our disposal to maximize value for a media slash live events company. So this is the right hole for WWE. In the weeks leading up to this deal, we heard Aria Manuel's comments on the earnings call. And I believe it was on the Morgan Stanley TMT conference where he was saying that he was basically reassuring shareholders that Endeavour wasn't going to take on more debt. And I'm starting to learn about a reverse morse trust and how that works. But apparently with a reverse morse trust, you're able to push down the debt, whatever that means. I take it to mean you're taking the debt and sort of distributing it across two companies. Have I got that right? Yeah, that's right. In essence, that's right. I mean, this was an all equity deal. So in a cash deal situation or a partial cash deal, usually that cash is from more debt. This deal is not that. It is two companies putting equity into a new company to make a bigger company. So there's no additional debt on top of what Endeavour already had as a company. So that's why I think the structure of this deal makes sense for Endeavour shareholders. Although, it's not like the company stock performed all that well. I believe it ended up the day down yesterday. I have not looked today to see what shares are trading at. But it wasn't some giant negative reaction either with shareholders to this deal. And I do think there would have been a much heavier negative reaction. Adam Deber said, look, we've got to take X billions of debt to buy this thing and just talk it into our current company. Endeavour is only slightly up today. And I've just started to look at this since I sat down. And WV is up almost 7% on the day, which I believe it was down by a few percent yesterday. So I don't know what's changed the sentiment today between today and yesterday. I'm not sure about today. Yesterday I can guess why the shares were down because I think investors thought, again, with Nick Khan coming out and saying there's some robust interest in this, I think some investors were preparing for some major bidding award. The Saudis and the media companies in Endeavour, this thing's going to go down to the wire and there's going to be first round bids and second round bids and up and up and up. So that didn't happen. So when the deal was announced, it was like, OK, well, that's not happening. So I'm guessing that's why shares were down yesterday. Maybe they're back up today because if you take a look at the per share value price of the deal versus what the stock is actually trading at, shares are trading at a lower valuation than what the companies said. WWE was worth. The price given on the deal was an enterprise value of $WV of $9.3 billion. But if you add up the market cap and the debt, it's much less than $9.3 billion now. So with the bump in shares today, perhaps investors are getting more comfortable with the idea that they actually believe that that enterprise value will be the value when these companies actually start to trade under the ticker TKO, the trade on the New York Stock Exchange. I think they said that deal would close later this year. Yeah. Is that going to be a genuine IPO or is that going to be, I was talking to somebody this morning trying to understand this, that they might use one of the company's stock as float or is this going to be a traditional IPO under TKO? I don't believe it will be an IPO. OK. But this goes back to the reverse more stressed idea. There will be no road show here or anything like that. It will just start trading in terms of like, think of it more as sort of a spinoff of a company which would never be traditional IPO either. So excuse me, you know, it will all of the, in an IPO situation, you need to recruit new public shareholders. In this case, it will be the actual shareholders of WWE and Endeavour that roll into this new company. So that's going to be the shareholder base. So there's no need to go out and recruit new shareholders. On of the individuals that you're reporting on on a day to day basis, what does it mean to have Ari Emmanuel and Nick Khan under the same umbrella? Is that cause for more optimism when it comes to these WWE rights leaning on a Nick Khan? And there's also a very interesting question of sort of the distribution of duties as well when you go into some of these larger media rights deals. Like does Ari take a more front-facing approach in the negotiations? Is this Nick Khan's sort of task moving forward? It's a lot of interesting questions with those two. There's also like the agency tensions, right? Sure. Because Nick, I'm from CAA and this is now a WME deal with Endeavour. Look, I don't know. I think we're going to have to see how that works. I think it was notable that on CNBC yesterday, the question was asked, not of Nick Khan, but a Vince McMahon and Ari Emmanuel, how are you going to deal with any potential disagreements that come down the road? Who's in charge of? You're going to ultimately either Vince McMahon or Ari Emmanuel is going to have to be the decision maker. So what's going to happen? And the answer that Emmanuel gave was if we disagree about something, we just won't do it. So first of all, I mean, this whole thing has a WWE slant to it in a sense because it's all a show, right? I mean, Ari Emmanuel is a showman, Vince McMahon is a showman. We had Nick Khan come out and say there's robust interest only to announce a deal over the weekend. Like he already knew the deal was in place when he was going on all these shows and saying there's robust interest. Like this is all a war. This is not a deal that was done in a weekend, right? Correct. It was the whole thing has been a war. Just like WWE is. So do I believe that Ari Emmanuel and Vince McMahon are just not going to do anything if they disagree? Of course I don't. So there's going to have to be some sort of pecking order there. I think that's a really valid potential, thorny thing that comes up here. You've got Dana White, Vince McMahon and Ari Emmanuel now all in leadership roles. Are they, those three people going to be able to coexist in the same company? I mean, I think that's at least a, that's something we need to worry about the abstract question. Certainly. And you know, we have seen what the dynamic has been with Ari and Dana White. But with Vince McMahon, like this is someone that has, he has not answered to anyone above since 1982. Like this is, and when you're a 77 year old, like very hard to, you know, mentally adapt to that kind of power distribution as well. Like you look on paper. These are some heavyweights that are all comprised here. But with that comes gigantic egos and a lot of different career paths that have got them there. And is there an adaptability that comes with this kind of a organizational chart? I mean, on the one hand, this deal makes sense because you've got a structure in place where theoretically you've got Vince McMahon can work. In other words, endeavor was open to the idea, not only open to it, but if you believe Ari Emmanuel, insist it that Vince McMahon come along and play a major part in this new company, where I think that was a major turn off to a lot of other buyers. On the other hand, now that it exists, we're going to have to see how three men with huge egos who don't shy away from that. I mean, they embrace the fact that these guys are alphas. How are they all going to be able to exist together? Maybe it will be fine. Certainly. You know, maybe they have mutual respect for each other and they'll all figure it out. They are professional businessmen with long track records of success. So it's certainly possible that it all works out. But you know, there's also fuel there for potentially combustible situation if it doesn't be right. Something that John and I have talked about a number of times is that we suspect that if this was any other industry, you think about the controversy that happened in CNN just for a recent example. If this were any other executive in any other industry, I don't know that Vince McMahon would come back from it. But he has, and he's not only come back from it, but he's made a big sale and he's sitting there on CNBC yesterday to announce this major merger news. So the key difference there is I'll give you two key differences. One, the idea that Vince McMahon would have had a history of sexual misconduct is not as surprising as it is with many other media executives. And to some degree, and you saw it with Donald Trump when he ran for president, right? People are sort of more accepting of a situation where they're not as surprised with things as if you were, if it came out of left field or you branded yourself as the moral authority. I think that's a factor. But that's abstract. The real factor, which makes this different from say a CNN situation, is that Vince McMahon was the majority shareholder of this company. So the idea that he would just go away was nonsensical. He'd have to sell the company. That's the only way he could go away. So Jeff Zucker goes away from CNN because he doesn't own CNN. So that would have to be the apples to apples comparison would be a company where the person actually owned it and controlled the voting shares. And something happened to that person and did they eventually go away and how did they go away? Sometimes in like an athletic standpoint, like the NFL or the NBA, we have seen forced sales, right? Like Donald Sterling or something like the Clippers. But there is no league over the WWE to force a sale here. There's just shareholders. And the guy that owns the voting rights is the guy that was under the sexual misconduct allegations. So that's the card that Vince McMahon always had here that maybe gave him a leg up over other media executives. One person raised me the formula one owner. I don't remember his name, but that was Bernie. Yeah. Yeah. And I think he's a big fan of the NBA and he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. And he's a big fan of the NBA. 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Yeah, it would be very interesting because back in 2018, when the current domestic rights deals went down, we got that Hollywood reporter, which was sort of a tech talk of how all the negotiations went down. It would be fascinating to see what the last month consisted of and how real some of the other bidders were when Endeavour became the front runner and a lot of the intercompany dynamics of Vince's whole navigation. And that certainly bleeds into everyone's focus on last night's Raw that seemed to be Vince McMahon having his control over that show. And certainly if you're just watching it from the outside looking in, I would say it would be the episode that would most convince even the greatest skeptic of the involvement. And the reporting is such and I've heard consistent. Certainly that bears out that this was Vince certainly having his control of the show. Yeah, and it's not just the thing that I think wrestling fans are some wrestling fans at least are uncomfortable with. That is the quality of the show, but that it has a genuine economic effect. Now that's sort of minimized in this situation where so much of the money comes from business partners and so much of the money is guaranteed in the form of TV rights or Saudi Arabia deals. Nonetheless, we've seen since the summer and it did start before the summer and I would say it started, it leveled off the popularity and the consumer metrics leveled off from their decline around the time the peacock deal started. I can look further into it, but the ticket sales being up is, I believe without doing the research on the fly here, I believe is something that we've seen since Paul Vivek took over creative. And I would say that the TV ratings improving year over year against the headwind of cable TV being down or TV generally being down. I think that it's something that I think has become more robust since Paul Vivek took over. But is it enough? Is Vince's effect on creative enough to really make a difference in their live TV rights value? Probably not. But it is a situation where it is probably going to become a less popular product and the more that Vince leads creative, I think the more vulnerable, WWE is to competition from, of course, their competition is TikTok, YouTube, the NFL, Netflix, sleep, and perhaps even AEW. So I think that's this is kind of good news for AEW, I suppose. You want Vince to be in there and disgruntled talent and fans. You want to be the, if you are by definition the alternative, it means you are different than and you don't want to be less than your competition. You want to be the alternative. But one thing I can state that is that hearing from enough people that are covering this industry for more the business side outside of the day to day wrestling stuff. These are people that are not necessarily, can tell you about all the angles and characters, but they definitely have a pretty good handle on fan sentiment toward the product. And it does seem like they do gauge what the audience is reacting to the programming and creative is constantly brought up in all of these different discussions and the creative direction that vis-a-vis connects to your fan engagement and popularity of the product. That's not something I would have said a few years ago. No, no, not at all. It's somewhat surprising, but it's consistent that they are very aware of the popularity under the various creative directions. We have two super chats here, so let's go to our first one here that asks, based off of last night's Raw, the Endeavour-owned WWE doesn't look promising with Vince as head of creative. What was already thinking? Do you think Ari was having cold feet watching Raw last night and wondering, oh my gosh, we are getting Brock Lesnar and Cody Rhodes coming out of this? Do you think Ari Emmanuel will watch Raw last night? I don't know. That's a good question. Probably not. Not much of it anyway, I would think. He's probably got other things to do. Did you see the show last night? I saw it. I looked the clip of Triple H speaking, but I listened to a lot of your review with Way. Great answer. It was more so just interesting the fact that it was almost like subtly acknowledged. But at the same time, it's not like this gigantic news story was plastered all over Raw. It was all WrestleMania. It was almost like they were trying to say Endeavour, we are not going to say sale, we are not going to say any of these words that scare any of our fans. And it was Hunter going out there to pretty much be reassuring at that time when honestly he was addressing it. He was addressing it not by name. There's some plausible deniability about maybe he was just giving this vague positive message or maybe he was addressing something specific. But I do think that the average wrestling fan doesn't know what a merger means necessarily and doesn't know what that means for the TV show that they watch every week. And I think it's- I was ready for Hunter to break down the reverse Morris Trust and explain this with WWE- Point of the Titan Tron and the diagram. Yeah. And pause for the pops and that would be the new This is Awesome would be RMT. But yes, that was kind of the handling of it. Just the opening segment that you would kind of have to read between the lines on. But thank you for the Super Chat. One other here. Do you think that Ari will care about the quality and perception of the show itself or is that going to be a non-issue for him? Like I said, if it affects live TV rights values, but we've- from 2016 to 2019, a lot of the consumer metrics, especially the ones that weren't affected by a tailwind were down in consecutive years. And their live TV rights fees were still really strong. They were still able in 2018 to get a 3.6 X increase on their US deal. So, I mean, I don't know. I don't know. He's going to care much more than Nikon cares about the quality of the product or what wrestling fans think about it as long as they're able to make the sort of great deals that they make. I'm really curious about what exactly were the conversations around whether to keep Vince on or not. I mean, yes, his public message is that, oh my God, we had to keep Vince. That is a public message. And I imagine there's a larger story in reality to that comment. So there you have it. Thank you for the Super Chats, everyone. And thanks to all of you for tuning in for the special live edition of Pollock and Thurston Interview. Can we pull the curtain back, Brandon? You get all the points here because this was cut in a close that you were going to be able to join us, but I'm glad you made it on time. I made it after pro. Fortunately, Alex needed an extra 15 minutes and I was ready. I was ready. I was here with three minutes of cushion here, but I made it. Fantastic stuff. I had to take my hand to an appointment. We just barely made it. You nailed it. A true pro is Brandon Thurston. So in the meantime, you can check out more of our work at patreon.com slash WrestleNomics as well post wrestling cafe.com support post wrestling and WrestleNomics. And Brandon, when will you be back this week? Thursday will be doing a podcast for subscribers only. That'll be out in the evening. And we are back for free for everybody on Sunday with at a time to be announced because it is Easter. That is true. I learned about this. This is Easter where I will be doing a UFC 287 post show. So for people that want to just dive in. What is this UFC stuff that you've been talking about all these years now is the time for all wrestling fans to dive in and learn about UFC. All right, that's going to wrap us up. Big thank you to Alex Sherman for taking time out to the chat with us. I really enjoyed that discussion and the Wizard of Oz waiting the man behind the scenes, keeping everything running so much. And I think that's a good thing. Running smoothly. We thank way as always. So that's going to wrap things up. And myself in way will be back Wednesday night after dynamite. So we will chat all about MJF Day and Tony Khan's major announcement. The bar's been set high this week for Tony. Yes. To make a major announcement. So we will see what he has in store. But that's going to wrap things up. So thanks to everybody. And we are out. So as always looking for ways to help pros get the job done. That's why we continue to invest in more inventory of our top pro products. 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