There’s a strange feeling in the air as we head into WrestleMania weekend, and it isn’t the usual buzz. Normally by this point we’re knee-deep in card predictions, debating who’s getting the Rumble winner’s rub, and arguing about whether the opener should be a ladder match or a hot tag team blowoff. Instead, we’re talking about ticket prices, on-air shoots, McAfee, Ari Emanuel, empty sections in Allegiant Stadium, and whether Cody Rhodes has gone rogue on live TV. It’s a lot. And it’s not all bad — but boy, is it a lot.
So let’s actually dig into it, because there’s plenty to love about this WrestleMania card if you can squint past the chaos. There’s also plenty to be irritated about. We’ll do both.
The elephant in the stadium: those ticket prices
WrestleMania 42 tickets are absurd. The two-night average has been sitting somewhere around $1,500 to $1,700 before fees, which is more than double what WrestleMania 41 averaged at the same venue last year (around $635). Compared to 2024, when the average was a relatively quaint $348, we’re talking about prices that have nearly quintupled in two years. U.S. inflation over the same period? About 5 to 6%. So ticket prices are running roughly fifty-five to sixty times the rate of actual inflation. There’s no spinning that. It’s a number that makes your eyes water.
The result has been exactly what you’d expect. As of a few days ago, WrestleTix had Night One sitting at around 39,000 distributed and Night Two at 41,000 — both well short of the 58,000–60,000 per night WWE managed at the same venue in 2025. Sales for the weekend are tracking nearly 19% behind last year. Allegiant Stadium is currently set up for about 45,000 a night, so they’re going to fill it eventually, but the fact that we’re a week out from the biggest show on the calendar and you can still walk up to the box office tells you everything you need to know.
TKO
The whole thing has the fingerprints of TKO and the UFC playbook all over it. Ari Emanuel and co. clearly looked at what UFC charges for a marquee card and thought, “Yeah, we can do that with wrestling.” And to be fair, they got away with it last year, partially on the back of John Cena’s retirement tour giving fans a one-time excuse to splash out. But there’s no Cena farewell to lean on this time, and the wrestling fan base — historically far less flush with cash than the UFC crowd — has finally hit the wall. Turns out, you can’t just keep ratcheting up prices forever and expect people to keep showing up. Who knew.
What makes the whole thing more frustrating is that the original plan was to take WrestleMania to New Orleans. The Caesars Superdome was announced back in February 2025, and three months later WWE pulled the plug and moved it back to Las Vegas because Vegas offered a bigger bid. New Orleans has hosted two of the most beloved WrestleManias of the modern era (30 in 2014 and 34 in 2018), and there’s a real argument — Bully Ray made it on his podcast this week — that running back-to-back ‘Manias in the same city is the kind of basic territorial mistake that wrestling promoters figured out roughly a hundred years ago. Don’t burn the town. WWE burned the town.
The McAfee thing, or: how to set fire to your own main event
Right, the Pat McAfee situation. Where do we even begin.
McAfee returned in early 2026 and immediately got slotted into the Cody Rhodes / Randy Orton storyline as Orton’s mystery phone caller — a slow-burn whodunnit that fans had been theorising about for weeks. Theories included Triple H, Edge, Stephanie McMahon, the ghost of Cody’s dad. The reveal? Pat McAfee. The ESPN guy. Whose agent — the same Ari Emanuel running TKO — happens to need ESPN buzz for the first WrestleMania airing on the network.
If your skin crawled reading that paragraph, you’re not alone. The whole thing reeks of corporate synergy, and reportedly that’s exactly what it is. Per BodySlam (via Heavy), the McAfee insertion was Emanuel’s idea to drive ESPN promotion, and several members of WWE’s creative team were unhappy about it. So unhappy, in fact, that on the April 3rd SmackDown, Cody Rhodes was reportedly told by creative to go to the ring and shoot from the hip. Which he duly did, comparing the McAfee reveal to “if Scott Hall and Kevin Nash talked about the third man in the nWo, and instead of Hulk Hogan, it was Disco Inferno.” Then he called McAfee a “stoner, grifter, Logan Paul without muscles, human hat rack” and told him, his agent, and “everyone who represents you” to kiss his ass.
INSERT PUNK
This was, to put it mildly, not subtle. Then Punk doubled down on Raw a few days later with the now-famous “tell him to LOWER THE TICKET PRICES” promo, name-dropping Emanuel without naming him and explicitly tying the McAfee insertion to the ticket sales problem. WWE put the clip on their official Twitter. Lower bowl tickets reportedly dropped below $2,000 within hours of the segment airing.
There’s something genuinely fascinating about all this. WWE is, on its own television, essentially confirming the fan complaints. The talent are shooting on the corporate overlords. The corporate overlords are reacting in real time. It’s the most “real” wrestling has felt in ages, and the irony is that none of it is happening in the matches themselves — it’s all happening in the meta-conversation around them. The product has become a soap opera about itself.
Whether that’s good or bad probably depends on how cynical you are. I’m somewhere in the middle. On one hand, it’s compelling television and it’s drawn in fans (myself included) who’d otherwise be tuning out. On the other hand… we’re now at the point where a top star going off-script to call out his own employer is being framed as a good thing, and that should probably worry us a bit.
Cody vs Orton: eighteen years in the making, four weeks to ruin
Here’s the bit that frustrates me most. Cody Rhodes vs Randy Orton should have been the easiest WrestleMania build in years. These two have eighteen years of history. Cody literally joined Legacy under Orton’s wing in late 2008. He was Orton’s protégé. Their entire relationship is the textbook “student becomes the master” arc that wrestling has been telling for a century, and it should have written itself.
Instead, WWE has crammed roughly nineteen plot twists into the last four weeks. Cody beat Drew McIntyre for the WWE Championship after Orton had already won the Elimination Chamber. McIntyre got shoved aside despite being the guy at the centre of it all. McAfee was revealed as the mystery caller. Then Orton turned heel at the contract signing. Then Cody went off-script. McAfee literally punted Cody in the head on SmackDown. Then they added McAfee into the actual match in some capacity. By the time we get to the bell on Saturday, fans are going to need a flowchart just to remember what’s actually being fought over.
PANIC STATIONS
The natural story was right there. Two men who came up together, bonded by Legacy and by sharing storylines for nearly two decades, finally meeting on the grandest stage with the title on the line. You don’t need McAfee. You don’t need a mystery caller. Title hot-shotting was not needed. You needed about eight weeks of Orton and Cody talking to each other. That’s it. That’s the build.
Instead, the WWE Championship feels like it got dragged into this match because TKO hit the panic button on ticket sales and decided they needed both Cody and Roman in main events across the two nights. Drew McIntyre, who’s been working his way up to a proper title run for what feels like the seventh time, gets shunted into an Unsanctioned grudge match with Jacob Fatu instead. That’s good for Drew and Jacob — they’ll probably steal the night — but the path to get there has been a mess.
The undercard: thrown together, but with some gems
The most frustrating thing about the build is that the rest of the card has clearly suffered while creative scrambled to fix the top of it. Carmelo Hayes, who carried the United States title with genuine “Him” energy for months, has been entirely left off the show. Sami Zayn vs Trick Williams should have been a triple threat. Fans have been asking for it for weeks. IYO SKY, one of the best women’s workers on the planet, is also not on the card after losing the tag titles with Rhea Ripley. Filler segments on Raw and SmackDown have been pretty rough lately, and lots of mid-card matches have been booked in the final two or three weeks of TV like creative was just throwing names into a hat.
But — and this is important — once you actually look at what’s on the card, there’s a stupid amount of good stuff. Let’s be honest with ourselves here.
THE MATCHES
Seth Rollins vs GUNTHER is going to be a banger. Both men coming off injury-shortened roads to WrestleMania, both looking to remind everyone who they are, GUNTHER having shed Heyman in murky circumstances. There is zero chance this isn’t a match-of-the-night candidate.
AJ Lee vs Becky Lynch for the Women’s Intercontinental Championship. AJ Lee is back, the Lynch storyline has been simmering since Wrestlepalooza, and Becky’s been chasing the title since losing it. This match has been built nicely across months of TV — proof, by the way, that WWE creative can still tell long stories when they’re allowed to.
The Intercontinental Championship Ladder Match — Penta defending against Je’Von Evans, Dragon Lee, Rusev, JD McDonagh and Rey Mysterio — is going to be ridiculous. Six guys who can all fly or hit hard, and at least three potential star-making spots in there. Rey Mysterio’s involvement is a lovely touch given his rib injury had cast doubt on his availability.
And then, of course, CM Punk vs Roman Reigns for the World Heavyweight Championship. A rerun of last year’s main event spot, minus Rollins, with the build leaning heavily on personal trash-talk (Punk threatening to “bury Reigns next to his deceased father” was a genuinely uncomfortable line, and Reigns calling Punk an old man got a real punch out of him on TV). It’s not subtle, but it’s effective. Reigns’ star power remains in a different league, and putting him in the Night Two main event is the right call regardless of what the discourse around it has been.
The ESPN factor
Here’s the bit that nearly got lost in all the noise: this is the first WrestleMania on ESPN, and the first hour of each night will air free on ESPN2 (Saturday) and ESPN (Sunday) before the rest of the show shifts to the ESPN streaming app. Internationally, Netflix continues to carry the event. The ESPN deal is reportedly worth $1.6 billion over five years, which is a staggering sum for what was, not that long ago, a regional cable curiosity.
This is genuinely huge. Wrestling getting onto ESPN proper — with marketing, with the imprimatur of “real sports” — is the kind of mainstream normalisation that the business has chased for decades. Nick Khan deserves real credit for it. And the fact that the opening hour is on linear cable for free is the kind of smart move that could pull casual viewers in.
The flip side? It’s also probably part of why Cody had to drop the title to set up the McAfee storyline, and why TKO is so jumpy about empty seats on the broadcast. They desperately don’t want ESPN’s cameras catching half-empty sections during their debut hour. Which is, in a way, the perfect summary of where WrestleMania 42 sits — pulled in two directions at once, trying to be both a wrestling show and a corporate showcase, and not quite knowing which version of itself to be.
So… is it going to be any good?
Honestly? Yeah, I think it’ll be great. The matches themselves are stacked. Punk vs Reigns will deliver. Rollins vs GUNTHER will steal the night for the workrate crowd. Rhea vs Jade will be the spectacle. The ladder match will be the chaos. Cody vs Orton, despite the rushed build, is still two of the best storytellers in the business doing their final dance, and there’s enough genuine history between them that the match itself can carry weight even if the build couldn’t.
What this ‘Mania has done, though, is expose a lot of the cracks in the TKO era. The pricing model isn’t sustainable. The corporate meddling in creative is producing visible friction. Talent are publicly unhappy and being given license to say so on TV. The trust between WWE and its core, hardcore fanbase has frayed in a way it really hasn’t since the worst days of late-Vince. That’s the actual story of WrestleMania 42, and the matches themselves will probably end up being a footnote to it.
Which is a shame, really. Because the matches are good. They deserve to be the headline. And on April 18th and 19th, hopefully, they will be.
Now if someone could just put the ticket prices in a chokehold for next year, that’d be great.
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