4 Questions that need answers before the WWE Greatest Royal Rumble

Set to take place on April 27, 2018, at the King Abdullah International Stadium in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the WWE Greatest Royal Rumble has a lot of people talking. First and foremost, it is a special event that will be airing on the WWE Network.

Second, the event is scheduled to have a lot of top talent that does not regularly wrestle on Raw or Smackdown. But most importantly, the name of the event has the word "Greatest" in it, and that is a big promise as to the quality being promised.

However, many of the details related to the WWE Greatest Royal Rumble have not yet been announced publicly. Therefore there are a lot of unknowns and plenty of questions for even the most devoted fan of sports entertainment.

Included here are four questions that I personally would like answered before watching the event, which launches at 12:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, with a pre-show starting one hour earlier at 11:00 AM. By knowing things like these -- for example, what is at stake for the participants involved -- more fans ought to be excited about the WWE product.

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#1 What is at stake for the winner?

The WWE Greatest Royal Rumble will kick-off with a pre-show event at 11:00 AM EST

As noted, it is unknown as to what is at stake for the 50 competitors scheduled to wrestle as part of the WWE Greatest Royal Rumble's namesake match. Participants in the annual Royal Rumble event are vying for a championship match at Wrestlemania, which is known as "the Grandest Stage Of Them All."

Therefore, this year Shinsuke Nakamura faced A.J. Styles after winning the men's match and Asuka battled Charlotte as a result of winning the inaugural women's match.

Being that Wrestlemania will have been less than a month after the WWE Greatest Royal Rumble event, it is unlikely that the winner of the match will get a title shot at the following year's Wrestlemania, or else that would be a very long build-up.

Could it be a title shot at Summerslam as that is the next major pay-per-view event? Could it be a similar contract-like scenario to Money In The Bank? Whatever it will be, it is unclear and it should be something that would matter to a WWE competitor for the sake of keeping the WWE Universe invested.

#2: Are there even 50 competitors on the men's roster that can truly compete in the match?

What a semi-full Royal Rumble ring looks like

Normally there are 30 competitors in a Royal Rumble match. There was one year in which there were 40 wrestlers involved, and that was felt to be a bit overdone. In 2018 there were 30 participants in the men's match, which seemed to be a stretch, as there still needed to be some one-off entrants like Rey Mysterio, The Hurricane, and NXT superstars Adam Cole and Andrade "Cien" Almas.

Even if surprise entrants are a large part of the fun of the Royal Rumble, the company will undoubtedly have to stretch the roster to fill spots. Will the WWE Greatest Royal Rumble be full of NXT upstarts? Will it be full of one-off appearances and/or returning WWE Superstars? Will there be people used from the Cruiserweight Classic and/or the U.K. Tournament for the sake of filling spots? Honestly, if the company "only" had 42 or 45 entrants announced, it would still be considered the largest Royal Rumble to ever be put on by the WWE -- and still a spectacle of sorts.

#3: Is this an inaugural event?

It has not been made clear whether the WWE Greatest Royal Rumble is intended to be a recurring event.

In looking at the WWE's schedule of pay-per-views, there are the mainstays, including Wrestlemania, Summerslam, Survivor Series, and the Royal Rumble. There are newer traditions to be expected, including Money In The Bank, Elimination Chamber, TLC, and Hell In A Cell.

Then there are ones which have come and gone, including No Mercy, Payback, and Great Balls Of Fire. Or if we go back even further, we can talk about old ones like Cyber Sunday, Bragging Rights, Judgment Day, and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

Is the WWE Greatest Royal Rumble slated to be an annual event? Is it being done for the sake of expanding the WWE further into Saudi Arabia and the Middle East as a whole? Is it the sign of the Royal Rumble no longer just being a once-a-year speciality match?

None of these questions have a clear answer attached to them, as we do not know if the WWE Greatest Royal Rumble is slated to be an inaugural event, or the plan is for it to be a one-time occurrence.

#4 Is this event a sign of more upcoming international events on the WWE Network?

The WWE Greatest Royal Rumble will air live on the WWE Network on April 27, 2018.

It is a big deal that the WWE Greatest Royal Rumble will be taking place in Saudi Arabia, thousands of miles from WWE's headquarters and the WWE Performance Center. All of the WWE's main roster has to be flown over to Jeddah for this event.

Then again, this is not the first time that the WWE Network has held a special televised program. For example, July 2015 had the Beast In The East pay-per-view, which aired live from Japan. January 2017's WWE United Kingdom Championship Tournament was filmed in Blackpool, England.

But the presentation of the WWE Greatest Royal Rumble with so much top talent feature brings the question as to whether it is a sign of more international productions to come. Such would not only be interesting to fans in those territories but also be of interest to diehard WWE fans that watch all of the programming available on the WWE Network.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the WWF used to broadcast house shows -- including those at Madison Square Garden and the Philadelphia Spectrum -- on local sports channels, so the idea of modern-day WWE presenting localized content is not entirely impossible.

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