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NICK KHAN ON HOW HE BECAME WWE PRESIDENT, CHANGING WWE'S PPV CALENDAR, WHAT SIDE OF THE BUSINESS HE WANTS TO IMPROVE AND MORE

Over the weekend, BT Sport released an interview conducted by Ariel Helwani with WWE President Nick Khan.  The following are highlights from the conversation, which was conducted on Friday 8/20:

Nick Khan's history as a pro wrestling fan:

"Number one, I worked WrestleMania IX, which was at Caesar's palace. I was in the infancy of my college years then. I worked at that event as an usher....Different than security. Usher, you take people to their seats, and you sit people down. So I worked that event, and the reason I worked that event was to get into the event for free. Certainly didn't have the money to, at the time, pay to get in. But I say this for all public school kids from the '80s, if you went to public school and you grew up in the '80s, you loved wrestling. So I watched every Saturday morning. I would try desperately to stay up for Saturday Night's Main Event. You'd go to your friend's house to watch the pay-per-view if your parents wouldn't buy the pay-per-view yet.  WrestleMania I, we watched closed circuit. We were living in Los Angeles at the time. We moved around a lot as a family growing up. Watched WrestleMania I, closed circuit watch WrestleMania III from pay-per-view.  Iron Sheik was huge in our house. My parents came from Iran. My sister and I are children of immigrants. So to see him on TV saying what he was saying at that time, we loved it. And it was a lot of fun. So yes, grew up a boxing fan, a WWF, at the time fan, and then ultimately an MMA fan, once that became part of the mainstream."

How Nick Khan came to be WWE President:

"I had the good fortune of helping the WWE as their agent with their sports media rights. So the last round of us negotiations with Fox, which ultimately ended up with Fox and NBCU getting SmackDown, and NBC retaining Raw. We all did that together. So we had success in that and as you know, success can oftentimes breed closeness amongst individuals. So the relationship was developing in August of 19, Triple H, Paul Levesque, who had become a good friend of mine, he and his wife, good friends of mine, graciously invited me in and my wife to his 50th birthday party, which was really his closest friends and family members. So at that party, obviously, Vince was there, Linda McMahon was there, other folks that they're close to. And it was the first time that I thought to myself, "Wow, this really feels comfortable." It felt like family to me, I thought to myself, "I wonder what could be down the road?" It wasn't until well, after that, that Vince and I had the conversation. But when you mentioned the embryonic stage, that was probably it."

"I was loving being an agent. And your words earlier, I do think we had had some success there doing it, and I was happy doing it. So I had been a lawyer prior to that for about seven years, which was also interesting. But, for me, being a lawyer felt like doing a lot of homework every day. And it was ultimately something I wanted to pivot out of, which I got lucky enough and pivoted out of into being an agent. So I was set in my mind to be an agent for the remainder of my career. When Vince and I started discussing it, that's when it changed. And it changed pretty quickly."

The last year working for WWE:

"Look, I got the opportunity to see people at their finest. So our production team, our creative team, our superstars never taking a week off in a pandemic, literally risking their lives so we could put on a product for our fans at home at a time where there wasn't a lot of fresh content for fans at home. So I came in, again as a representative or the agent for the WWE and the media rights. I had a glimpse from the outside, looking in as to what the WWE was all about. I was impressed with it. When I saw it firsthand, how hard people worked and how dedicated they were, even more impressed."

"We need our fans. It's the lifeblood of this business. So we have immediate reaction as to what's working and what's not working when we have our fans with us. So we did what we needed to do. I think we kicked some ass in doing it. At the same time, we were thrilled to get fans back for the two night WrestleMania event. And then ultimately on July 16th in Texas, when we re-emerged. And here we are with over 45,000 tickets sold for tomorrow night. Keep in mind because of our production, which you're familiar with, it wipes out an end zone of seats. So we're going to be at capacity tomorrow night [Summerslam 2021] and ready to go."

What aspect of WWE business Khan would like to improve:"So I think number one, in terms of the folks who had the job prior to me, I think highly of them and had a nice relationship with them. I think what we're looking to do moving forward, I think if you look at our international media rights, we know a global localized product is what the future holds.   What I mean by that, during the pandemic, for our partners in India, which is our Sony, we did a Indian Superstar Spectacular, we called it. Which was all of our Indian talent up and coming talent, all right now, not known talent against some of our American superstars. We did a five-X multiple on our rating in India for that show compared to our normally high rated Raw and SmackDown shows. It proved out what a lot of people in the media business know, people want to see a local product.    So as we look at the different international territories, we're, hyper-focused on a number of them. We think there's a lot of growth there. We also think in our merchandise business, our E-commerce sales, like many other companies during the pandemic, was very, very high. Going back into arenas, our sales of in-venue merchandise, also up about 50%.  Why is that? We've sort of created a localized product per city. So if you, for example, tomorrow night at summer slam, there's going to be a lot of Las Vegas centric, WWE merchandise that you can only buy in-venue. And ultimately it'll go online also, but rather than just hoping or expecting that our fans are going to buy the same Roman Reigns shirt that they could have bought a week ago online, we have a collab with the Raiders. We have a collab with the Golden Knights. We have a 500 shirt, limited edition, Mr. McMahon Vegas shirts, with sort of fake billionaire bucks with his image in the middle of them, just to be sold in-venue tomorrow [Summerslam 2021] night. We think that approach, which is a group of us who came up with this, is what's led to the increased in venue merchandise sales."

WWE's PPV model and scheduling going forward:

"We're looking for any sports date on the sports calendar where a big sporting event doesn't exist. And I'll give you an example of that. So New Year's Eve, this coming New Year's Eve, is a Friday night. Atlanta expects three to 400,000 people to go to Atlanta for New Year's. My belief is, and by the way, the two college football playoff games, are also on that Friday, December 31st, New Year's Eve.  My belief is, that people who are going to Atlanta, they don't wake up Saturday morning after a long night out for New Year's and say, "Okay, let's go home." They want to do something on Saturday night. So I'm older than you, probably a lot older than you, but let's just leave it at that for now. I say that because there was a moment in time where all of the big college football games were on New Year's Day. That's changed. They're not all on New Year's Day, as we know.  So we have a Saturday night, where the Rose Bowl is happening that night, but it's not one of the two college football playoff games. So we saw it as an open night. And the Atlanta folks, our partners at State Farm Arena, are excited for the event. We're excited for the event. And we're always going to look at that calendar to see what we think might work tomorrow night, being an example of that as well."

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