September 25 Observer Newsletter: Terry Funk, WWE cuts, SmackDown leaving Fox

The first major news by the newly merged TKO Holdings company were the expected major cuts by WWE, with more than 100 employees let go on Black Friday, and on the flip side, later that night Dwayne Johnson returned at Smackdown. Six days later a number of wrestlers that mostly weren’t being used were cut.

It was well known there would be massive cuts as plans were to cut back on $50 million to $100 million in expenses on the WWE side. Most of the cuts were made in regard to duplication of work, more from the Endeavor end than the UFC end.

WWE and UFC will largely operate autonomously from each other. For an example, one of the hardest hit departments in the cuts was Analytics, where about 85 percent of the employees were let go. But the reasoning behind that was because Endeavor has a very strong analytics team that will not be covering WWE. So it wasn’t the idea that analytics aren’t important. Former presidents George Barrios and Michelle Wilson were very big on learning from and expanding that department, but it was duplication of jobs more within Endeavor than within UFC.

Employees were told that all the major cuts that will be made related to the merger. As noted before, one of the things in UFC that left employees very bitter after it was bought by Endeavor in 2016 was that they were told after the first round of cuts that there would be no more cuts, and there were. They were also told many times that there would be no sale and the news stories were incorrect, and there was, while the fact WWE was going to be sold was public knowledge.

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