ESPN Executive Says Scheduling WWE Wrestlepalooza Had Less To Do With Wrestling Competition, ‘There Is Competition Everywhere’

WWE will kick off its deal with ESPN on September 20 with WWE Wrestlepalooza. The event was announced on August 20th and was originally planned to go head-to-head with AEW All Out.

AEW moved All Out to the afternoon to avoid going head-to-head.

Speaking on a WWE-ESPN media call, ESPN Programming and Acquisitions Lead Matt Kenny and ESPN SVP JT Lasker were asked by Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp about counter-programming.

“We work collaboratively with WWE on schedule,” said Kenny. “In this particular case, many of their events had already been scheduled. Normally, in these types of arrangements — so my team and I work on the NBA. We also handle UFC. There’s really a lengthy process where you work with the partner to identify specific dates. You build out your schedule so you align in that regard, and so on. On some level, WWE is scheduled throughout the rest of the year. Throughout the rest of 2025, there had been a number of dates already on the calendar, and in this particular case, we were just laser-focused on launching WWE. We knew we wanted to have a marquee WWE event in September to support the launch of ESPN’s direct-to-consumer offering, as JT mentioned before, so it really had less to do with any particular wrestling competition. In fact, we take a holistic view. We know there’s competition everywhere, and certainly in the fall on Saturdays, I don’t need to explain to this group, there’s no shortage of college football competition throughout the day, right? We’re in the teeth of the football season now, so we welcome competition. We really take a ‘Hey game on’ approach, and we’re focused on what we can do, in this particular case, to super-serve WWE and wrestling fans on our platforms.”

Lasker stated, “Everything that Matt said, I 1,000% agree with, in addition, we’ve got an incredible sort of digital ecosystem here and in a great product that we just launched on August 21 which, which effectively allows us to, you Know, to to do what we need to do, sort of in the even with or without, you know, competition. So this Saturday night, just on our own networks, there’s a lot of really great college football games going on, and we get really excited about. I mentioned the features and functionality that we talked about. One of those is multi-view. Fans are going to be sitting there on Saturday night, watching Wrestlepalooza in Miami, Florida, at the same time, and can sort of super in and super out as they see fit, or as they wish.

“Our hope there is it’s just going to drive more interest and engagement in the WWE and vice versa, that hopefully WWE fans that are coming to us get to sort of experience and become fans of a lot of the other sort of sports content that we’ll be able to present to them. So there’s growth and opportunity and sort of excitement in terms of how we serve sports fans, irrespective of the sort of competitive set. The more sports fans that are on our platform on Saturday night, watching various things, is good for all of us.”

Triple H previously said that Wrestlepalooza came together quickly and ESPN asked for the date. Fans can find his comments here.

Fans can check out the lineup for WWE Wrestlepalooza here.

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