Vince McMahon has been busy. From working out a deal with Facebook to broadcast the Mixed Match Challenge, to selling $100 million dollars worth of WWE stock to fund his new startup company Alpha Entertainment LLC, the chairman has been pushing quite a lot of new deals the past month.
However, the Wrestling Observer Newsletter brought up some very important details in regards to a possible move to Fox, if not something more. UFC’s TV contract with Fox is up this year and hasn’t locked in a deal with anyone else. And with the recent sale of the 21st Century Fox studio to Disney in 2017, the network has quite a bit of money to throw around-roughly $52.4 billion.
According to WON:
-Triple H met with Fox Sports execs months ago for preliminary talks. Supposedly, Fox plans to go after WWE if the UFC heads somewhere else.
-Fox programming has filled many timeslots with MMA, so grabbing WWE could easily replace those slots with Raw, Smackdown, and any other WWE shows they’d like.
-Vince McMahon isn’t planning on selling, believing that a new broadcasting deal could raise the stock prices. However, Dave Meltzer believes that he would sell if Fox gave him the same offer they gave UFC- at $3.6 billion.
-If this happens, Raw would return to a two-hour show (8 – 10 PM Eastern) on Fox, while Smackdown would go to FS1. This would be ideal for WWE and McMahon, who would like to be on a traditional network in prime time.
-Viacom, the owner of Spike TV, soon to be rebranded as The Paramount Network) has also been looking to get back into the wrestling business, but not with WWE. It’s possible they could look to go into business with someone smaller.
At this moment, these are just rumors reported by WON and should be treated as such.
