Various: TKO Settles UFC Antitrust Lawsuits, Grizzled Young Vets on WWE Departure & Career Future, MLW Interested in Mauro Ranallo, Indies

Mar 21, 2024

TKO Group Reaches Settlement Deals for UFC Antitrust Lawsuits

WWE’s parent company TKO Group announced in a recent filing to the SEC that they had reached a settlement deal on March 13th for the antitrust class action lawsuits against UFC.

These lawsuits had claimed that UFC had committed antitrust actions to dominate the MMA industry allowing them to buy up all of their competition and stifling the market for MMA fighters. It was also claimed that UFC’s actions allowed them to sign MMA fighters to long-terms deals and underpay them as much as less than half of what they have recieved otherwise for their market value.

In the filing, TKO stated that they will be paying a total of $335 million to MMA fighters affected as part of the terms of their settlement deal. This monetary amount was much lower than the $800 million to $1.6 billion that was being originally asked for damages from UFC.

TKO’s SEC filing:

As previously disclosed, TKO Operating Company, LLC (f/k/a Zuffa Parent, LLC) (“TKO OpCo”), a subsidiary of TKO Group Holdings, Inc. (the “Company”), and/or certain of its affiliates, including Endeavor Group Holdings, Inc., TKO OpCo’s ultimate parent entity (collectively, “TKO”), are party to several substantially similar class-action lawsuits filed against them by former UFC athletes, alleging violations of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Five related class-action lawsuits filed between December 2014 and March 2015 were consolidated into a single action in June 2015, captioned Le et al. v. Zuffa, LLC, No. 2:15-cv-1045-RFB-BNW (D. Nev.) (the “Le” case), and an additional lawsuit, captioned Johnson et al. v. Zuffa, LLC et al., No. 2:21-cv-1189-RFB-BNW (D. Nev.) (the “Johnson” case), was filed in 2021.
On March 13, 2024, TKO reached an agreement to settle all claims asserted in both class action lawsuits (Le and Johnson) for an aggregate amount of $335 million payable by the Company and its subsidiaries in installments over an agreed-upon period of time. The terms will be memorialized in a long form agreement and then submitted to the court for approval. The Company anticipates that the settlement amount will be deductible for tax purposes.
The information in this Current Report on Form 8-K shall not be deemed “filed” for purposes of Section 18 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Exchange Act”), or otherwise subject to the liabilities of that section, nor shall it be deemed incorporated by reference in any filing under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the “Securities Act”), or the Exchange Act, except as expressly set forth by specific reference in such a filing.

Grizzled Young Veterans on WWE Departure & Future of Their Wrestling Careers

A recent episode of the Swerve City Podcast featured The Grizzled Young Veterans’ James Drake and Zack Gibson as the guests. One of the topics discussed included Drake and Gibson’s thoughts about their recent run in WWE and departure from the company.

Zack Gibson – “There’s a lot of moving parts backstage with a lot of things happening so, just to jump on a point there that J.D. said there… we came out here to elevate our careers and then for maybe the last 12 months or so at WWE, that’s not what was happening with us so one of the things we get asked quite a lot is, ‘How could you guys take this risk? How could you take this gamble to walk away from the WWE? How could you do that thing?’ But ultimately, it’s because we are still in the business of elevating our careers. So WWE’s stock, right now is still going up. It’s crazy. They’re doing great business. Arguably, the best TV they’ve put out in years. The company’s doing great but our personal stock wasn’t. Our personal stock was going down within WWE and ultimately, whilst I try to do business for whoever is employing me at the time, I do have to worry most about our own personal stock. So we made that decision based on us. Now that we’re outside of WWE, it was a gamble. We have to, ‘Oh sh*t. Is this the right thing?’ But we’ve both seen already in the short time that we’re out, we’ve already seen our personal stock going back up. That’s exactly why we left.”
James Drake – “A lot of people had the best intent over there, but there’s one thing that someone said constantly as sort of like a catchphrase for everyone to kind of motivate people and I will say it is a good thing to say but, in our situation and where we were, it was the worst thing you could say to us. Where they would say, ‘Pay it forward’ and I would say, ‘Pay what forward? Because I’ve not got it. You’re not giving it to me. What am I paying forward?’”
Gibson – “Pay me forward! (He laughed) Pay me first and then I’ll pay it forward.”
Drake – “Pay me first. It just got to a point where we’re passionate about wrestling and contrary to what we are on, you know, our characters and stuff, we’re nice people. So if anyone’s struggling, especially at that P.C. or anything, we’re gonna help and I think people kind of figured that out at some point and kind of gave us a lot of people to kind of help and as much as it’s a nice compliment and everything, when it comes down to business, it wasn’t good business for us.”
Drake – “The way my mind was working with it was like, you know the phrase, ‘The writing’s on the wall’? It was gradually getting more and more profound. You’d see a few f*cking letters and then you’re like, uhh, I can kind of figure it out and then next week, there’ll be more letters and it’ll just be more and more to the point you’re like, it is clear as day.”
Gibson – “It wasn’t one big thing and obviously, a lot of the time with“
Drake – “And that’s worse by the way. It’s worse that it’s not one big thing…”
Gibson – “J.D. was ready a lot earlier than I was.”
Drake – “So the time when we applied for green cards, I was like, ‘I’m done’ (he laughed).”
Gibson – “We both spoke about it and I was like, ‘Okay, look, you got to still give X, Y and Z. We got to give this time to see how this plays out.’ He goes, ‘Okay, let’s give it time’ but then, after so long, he keeps coming back to me like, ‘You give it enough time yet?’ I’m like, ‘Alright, fair enough…’ I don’t wanna come across bitter with the company because we’re just not. They have their own business to do, they don’t owe us anything. It’s just similarly, we don’t owe them anything. We signed a contract, we agreed on the wage. They said, perform this, we will pay you this. We said, okay. We perform this, you pay us this. Both parties have fulfilled our contractual duties and just again, business just wasn’t right for us so we had to move on. We saw all of these little things which we don’t have to get into detail about but, we saw where our personal stock was, we saw what the trajectory of our careers were. Should we stay? And we thought, it got to this question of, do we stay here and scratch and claw and try and break through this barrier? Try and climb out of this rut, knowing that it’s not promised that we can get through this. Knowing that there’s so much red tape at WWE to cut. Do we stay here and struggle? Or, do we just sidestep, go and have fun, get back to what we enjoy doing? And then, if we end up circling back, amazing, we did it and if we don’t, we find something else that we like just as much, then let’s just stay there.”

Grizzled Young Veterans also gave their thoughts about the future of their wrestling careers.

Drake – “I think sometimes, people forget we all have the same goal. I think anyway, most people have the same goal where it’s like, we want to do what’s best for the show and best for the product. We all have different opinions but ultimately, we all have that so like, once you trust someone, for example, TNA are trusting me and Zack to push forward. They’re just letting us pretty much do what we want, because they’re just going, yeah, we trust you, we’ve watched you. We know you guys are good so, if you think that’s best, do it.”
Gibson – “What also kind of helps is having being somewhat burned. Again, not trying to blame anyone for it but having being somewhat burned in what we wanted to achieve, we’re also not super eager to jump straight into potentially being burned again. So we’re still operating independently right now, even with our work that we’re doing at TNA. We’re still non-exclusive, we still have the freedom to do what we want. So, that next deal whether it be TNA, because we love working at TNA. I can’t stress that enough. The company is great, backstage is great. It’s just because we wanna make sure it’s 100 percent, the next contract for however long that is-is the right one for that time period so whether it is TNA, AEW, New Japan, whatever it is next, it’s gonna be the right thing for us going forward.”

Transcript h/t: PostWrestling.com

MLW Reportedly in Talks with Mauro Ranallo for Potential Deal

Major League Wrestling reportedly is currently interested in signing former WWE announcer Mauro Ranallo to a potential contract with the company, according to Fightful Select.

Sean Ross Sapp reported that his sources stated that MLW officials have been in recent talks with Ranallo about the possibility of Ranallo working for the company. Sapp reported that a deal between the two sides have yet to be reached.

Sapp also reported that Ranallo has history with MLW owner Court Bauer due to them working together in the past for Strikeforce.

Misc. Wrestling News & Notes

Wednesday’s Cinderella Tournament 2024 Finals event for Stardom in Nagoya, Japan featured Hanan defeating Ami Sourei to be crowned the winner of this year’s Cinderella Tournament.

Wednesday’s Cinderella Tournament 2024 Finals event for Stardom in Nagoya also featured Maika issuing an official challenge to Megan Bayne for a match between the two for Maika’s World of Stardom Championship at Stardom’s American Dream event on April 4th in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The International Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame recently announced that this year’s class of inductees will be officially announced on May 4th.

As noted before, ticket sales for TNA Wrestling’s upcoming Under Siege 2024 event was originally scheduled to go on sale this past Saturday but was postponed due to a ticketing-related issue preventing the start of the public sale. TNA recently provided an update announcing that tickets for their upcoming event will now officially go on sale starting on Saturday, March 23rd.

In a recent episode of the Eyes Up Here with Francine podcast, Alisha Edwards gave her thoughts about former TNA President Scott D’Amore’s recent firing from the company. Edwards stated “I think everyone was shocked (about Scott D’Amore’s exit from TNA), I think the wrestling world was shocked, the locker room was shocked. I think our momentum is probably the highest it’s been in years, even a decade I would say. I’ve been with IMPACT for six, seven years so almost close to a decade I think is — we have the highest momentum we’ve had. So I think the firing of Scott… I was a little blindsided. But I mean, what are you gonna do? I’m loyal to Scott but I’m also loyal to TNA and I think the engine needs to keep running and I think we need to keep the momentum going. That’s all we can really do. Scott was a real puzzle piece in our journey that we had making TNA what it is now but I mean, at the end of the day, the locker room did as much work as Scott did so I think the locker room just needs to come together and stay positive and keep the ball rolling and I mean, that’s all we can really do at this point. And I guess the bummer is because the morale in the locker room is very high right now but I mean, maybe that’s a blessing in disguise and I think that’s truly gonna bring all of us together to make sure that — there are gonna be people that are emotionally attached to Scott. Scott wasn’t just our boss. He was our mentor, he was a coach. He inspired us, he pushed us, he yelled at us, you know what I mean? (She laughed) It was all of it so, he was very important to a lot of people on the roster and we built a lot of relationships over the years too so, it was like we had to grieve a little but, at the end of the day, the show doesn’t stop… We gotta keep going and right now, our momentum’s good.” (Transcript h/t: PostWrestling.com)

WrestleCon announced that Powerhouse Hobbs and Nick Wayne will be making an appearance for the company at their WrestleCon 2024 on April 4-7, 2024 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

WrestleCon also recently announced one new match for the card of their Mark Hitchcock Memorial Supershow 2024 event on April 4th in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: