mONEy, mONEy, mONEy
What - if anything - can be done to make
Britwres profitable again?
|By JOHN ATKINS-
johnatkinsiii@yahoo.com|
m
y first MMA show took place in the King’s Hall in
Belfast. On the same night, just up the road, the WWE
were in town. As were a popular local boxing
promotion. And it was the night of the rugby world cup
final. A typical Britwres promoter would already be drafting the
internet press release in his head, salivating at the excuses presented
before him. A three-figure crowd would be considered a triumph of
monumental proportions.
And yet the MMA event drew just shy of 3,000 rabid fans. And at
the end of the night far from haggling for my train fare home and
the price of a kebab, I received a cheque that covered my rent for a
fortnight.
A few months later, I worked another MMA show for the same
company, and this time they drew just under 1,000 fans - in a
4,000-seater venue. Ouch. Yet again, at the end of the night I
received the same amount, as agreed beforehand. No
questions. No excuses. No problems.
More recently, I was texted two days before a wrestling
show by a promoter, unbooking me from the weekend’s
show, because they had had a poor gate a few weeks earlier
on a show I hadn’t even been on. Terribly sorry, and all that,
but your services will not be required this weekend, we’re
trying to save money and minimise our losses.
As someone who had been trying - and very, veryoccasionally
succeeding - to make a living from wrestling and MMA work, I found this
unacceptable. They did not appear to have a sustainable business plan,
ran continual loss-making shows, seemingly solely for the approval of a
rapidly dwindling online fanbase, and subsidised these at the expense of
the talent. Being removed from the show without even the courtesy of a
phone call was the final straw, and I decided not to work for them again.
What made the whole situation so ridiculous is that the amount of
money involved was literally one-tenthof what I would expect to earn
for an MMA show.
So why is there such a huge discrepancy between wrestling and
MMA?
9 The online magazine for pro wrestling fans worldwide
thewrestlingpress.com
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