George Barrios spent more than a decade selling WWE to Wall Street as a clean growth story. In a memoir published on June 2, the former co-president describes the call that nearly wrecked it: keeping the WWE Saudi Arabia deal alive after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. WWE held on because the contract was, in Barrios’s telling, too worthwhile to walk away from, even as the stock slid from $93 to under $70 in a matter of weeks.
Vince McMahon called it possibly the biggest risk the company had ever taken. Barrios pushed to stay in. Eight years on, with WrestleMania headed to Riyadh in 2027 and Saudi events driving TKO’s quarterly revenue, the wager that looked reckless in late 2018 reads very differently on the balance sheet.
What Barrios Put on the Page
Barrios joined WWE in 2008 and rose to co-president and board member alongside Michelle Wilson, running strategy and finance during the company’s move into streaming and licensing. The two were let go in January 2020. His book, a Skyhorse Publishing memoir on transforming WWE, devotes a section to the Saudi negotiation and the panic that set in when it nearly fell apart.
The deal had been hard to close. “Our negotiations dragged on because the Saudis are notorious hagglers,” Barrios writes. By the autumn of 2018 the contract was close to signed, then Khashoggi vanished inside a Saudi consulate and the whole thing came back into question.
Inside WWE, the debate split the leadership. McMahon, Wilson and Barrios spent long stretches weighing whether to run the next event at all. McMahon, by Barrios’s account, was the most uneasy of the three.
This thing with Khashoggi. Doing the deal could be the biggest risk we’ve ever taken with the company.
That was McMahon, then WWE’s chairman, as quoted in the book. Barrios’s reply was that the facts were still unknown and the company could not abandon a signed commitment on incomplete information. He admits in the same passage that he could not say who was truly at fault, only that the killing had thrown the deal into doubt. The argument to stay won.
The Murder That Forced the Question
Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributing columnist and a critic of the Saudi government, walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018. He never walked out. The killing turned a routine sports-business contract into a reputational minefield.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, the United States foreign intelligence service) later reached its own conclusion about who ordered the operation. Several major firms and executives pulled out of Saudi Arabia’s flagship investment conference in Riyadh that month. WWE did not pull out of anything.
The legal aftermath set the backdrop against which WWE made its choice:
- The CIA assessed that the columnist was killed on orders from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler.
- The United States imposed sanctions on seventeen Saudi nationals over the killing; the crown prince was not among them.
- A Saudi court sentenced five people to death, jailed three others and acquitted three, with the death sentences later commuted.
None of that stopped the November show. WWE ran Crown Jewel in Riyadh on November 2, 2018, a month to the day after the columnist disappeared.
A Deal Worth Too Much to Lose
The math explains why Barrios dug in. In January 2018 WWE announced a ten-year agreement with the General Sports Authority of Saudi Arabia, launching that April with the Greatest Royal Rumble. The arrangement called for two large events a year inside the kingdom, and the fees were unlike anything else on WWE’s books.
The exact terms were never published, but the numbers can be reconstructed from WWE’s regulatory filings. Wrestling-finance analysts at Wrestlenomics worked them out by tracking the “other” line in WWE’s media segment, a method laid out in a breakdown of WWE’s Saudi event revenue. The picture that emerged was a single market paying a double-digit share of the company’s entire top line.
- $50 million in estimated revenue per event, far above any other live show WWE ran.
- $100 million a year from two Saudi events, on a deal reported at roughly $1 billion across its full term.
- More than 10% of WWE’s annual revenue, which sat near $930 million in 2018.
For an executive whose job was protecting the growth story, walking away from that money over an event no one fully understood was the harder sell. Barrios made the case that the deal was too valuable to surrender, and management agreed.
The Stock Took the First Hit
Investors did not share the confidence. WWE shares had hit an all-time high near $97 in late September 2018. Once the killing dominated headlines and the company signaled it would run Crown Jewel anyway, the stock cratered, sliding from above $90 to the mid-$60s inside a month, a drop of roughly a quarter of the company’s market value. The decline from $93 to under $70 wiped out months of gains.
The pain did not pass quickly. WWE’s share price spent the next several years failing to reclaim that 2018 peak, dragged by a soft television-rights cycle and broader doubts about the company’s growth.
The recovery only arrived in 2023, when Endeavor merged WWE with the Ultimate Fighting Championship to create TKO Group Holdings, the combat-sports company now listed in New York. By then the Saudi controversy had faded from financial coverage and the events had become a fixture. The bet had cost real money for years before it started paying.
From the Greatest Royal Rumble to WrestleMania 43
What began as two annual shows has grown into one of the busiest corners of WWE’s calendar. The kingdom went from hosting a single novelty event to anchoring marquee weekends, including the first women’s matches WWE staged in the country and a regular slot for its biggest stars. That escalation tracks the arc of the original wager.
- April 2018: The Greatest Royal Rumble opens the partnership in Jeddah, weeks after the ten-year deal is signed.
- November 2018: Crown Jewel runs in Riyadh despite the global backlash over the Khashoggi case.
- 2024: WWE deepens its footprint, taking SmackDown and King and Queen of the Ring events to Saudi Arabia alongside its established Crown Jewel show.
- 2026 and 2027: Riyadh hosts the Royal Rumble and then, in a first for the brand, WrestleMania 43 in Saudi Arabia in 2027.
WWE confirmed the WrestleMania plan on September 12, 2025, with Chief Content Officer Paul Levesque presenting in Riyadh. The two-night show, slotted into the 2026-2027 Riyadh Season, will be the first time a WrestleMania has run outside North America in the event’s history. The deal that nearly broke over a murder now hosts the company’s crown jewel weekend.
Where the Wager Stands Now
The financial verdict is no longer in doubt. TKO reported $1.6 billion in first-quarter revenue for 2026, with executives crediting media deals and the Saudi Royal Rumble as growth drivers, and management used the earnings call to reaffirm its commitment to events in the kingdom. The Saudi line that once spooked the market now reads as a reliable engine.
The ethical questions Barrios raised in 2018 have not been settled, only sidelined. Mohammed bin Salman was never charged and remains the kingdom’s ruler, and rights groups still point to Saudi spending on sports as an exercise in reputation laundering, a critique the Council on Foreign Relations lays out in its explainer on Saudi sports investment and sportswashing. WWE’s answer, in practice, has been to keep booking shows.
Barrios frames the 2018 call as a decision made on incomplete information under intense pressure, and he does not pretend it was clean. The original ten-year deal runs out the same year WrestleMania lands in Riyadh, and the company that once feared the partnership could sink it is now planning its biggest night around it. The biggest risk WWE ever took is the one it can no longer afford to lose.
