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What’s the story?
This week’s episode of Monday Night Raw will come to us from the SAP Center in San Jose, California and the ticket sales are said to be “disappointing.”
Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter reports that there are still a lot of tickets available for the last RAW before No Mercy.
In case you didn't know...
Ratings and viewership for WWE programming have been on the decline since the Attitude Era, but attendance was typically steady for the company.
Of late, the live attendance has taken a major hit as well, owing to a variety of factors.
The heart of the matter
On the latest episode of Wrestling Observer Radio, Meltzer said that ticket sales for the San Jose edition of RAW “weren’t that strong” and that there were a lot of tickets available on Ticketmaster.
At the time of this writing, the following picture is all the tickets available for purchase on Ticketmaster if adjusted for one person:
However, it should be noted that when adjusting the ticket availability for groups of 2 or more, it’s mostly the upper deck and the second level of seats opposite of the hard camera that aren't selling well.
WWE has held programming at the SAP Center over the years and the California area generally does see better sales so this could be a cause for concern for the WWE.
What’s next?
Brock Lesnar and John Cena will be absent from this week’s episode of RAW and this could heavily impact the viewership for the show. Especially since WWE has to deal with Monday Night Football now.
Ratings for go-home shows in recent years have been relatively low, so not having two of the company’s biggest stars on the last show before the pay-per-view could cause the viewership to tank.
Author’s take
With Lesnar and Cena absent this week, Raw’s ratings and ticket sales may suffer greatly.
So much for “ticket sales are great.”
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