It’s not a secret that the WWE regularly inflates their attendance numbers for the biggest event of the year. Recently, Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics recently revealed some interesting stats on the event by digging up some KPI documents belonging to the WWE on Google Drive.
The documents show that when the WWE calculates attendance, they take into consideration staff, security, and the WWE superstars themselves. Judging by the numbers, the WWE has been exaggerating the difference between the actual and marketed attendance figures more and more with each passing year.
Here are a series of Tweets from Thurston showing the difference between the actual and announced attendance by year as well as an explanation of how they calculated this data:
Wrestlemania attendance, 2008-2018. WWE's announced attendance vs. what their own financial reporting implies.
Data: https://t.co/qfUxsviNJz pic.twitter.com/CPzlHPlxga
— Brandon Thurston (@BrandonThurston) March 16, 2019
KPI documents (originally published on WWE's corporate website) referenced in the data sheet are archived here: https://t.co/JSjCBojFu7
— Brandon Thurston (@BrandonThurston) March 16, 2019
How we know these numbers:
Each year since 2008 for the quarter containing Wrestlemania, WWE reports in its KPI document an avg attendance number including and excluding WM.
Doing the math shown in the spreadsheet we deduce a range of what the paid attendance must have been.
— Brandon Thurston (@BrandonThurston) March 16, 2019
Credit: Wrestlenomics.
