Perth, Western Australia, just signed a three-year deal to host WWE’s flagship shows through 2028, and I can’t find a single public dollar figure attached to what the state is paying for the privilege. Tourism Western Australia and WWE announced this week that Perth will host an annual “WWE Weekend Takeover,” starting with SmackDown on December 11, Wrestlepalooza: Perth on December 12, and Raw on December 14, all three shows at RAC Arena. That’s WWE’s two weekly flagship shows plus a Premium Live Event packed into one arena over four days, the kind of density American markets only see when they’re hosting WrestleMania. I’ve watched this exact instinct play out in Las Vegas and Riyadh: a government wants to be a host city badly enough that it agrees to bankroll WWE’s stage before anyone asks what the check looks like.
Wrestlepalooza itself is only two shows old. The first ran in September 2025 in the U.S., headlined by John Cena and Brock Lesnar, with Cody Rhodes closing the night over Drew McIntyre. Perth gets the sequel as a repeat customer. WWE already ran Elimination Chamber there in 2024 and Crown Jewel in 2025, two shows Tourism Western Australia says combined for more than AUD $58 million in economic impact for the state. That number gets repeated in every version of this announcement. The number that doesn’t get repeated is what the state committed to pay for three more years of it, because it isn’t in the announcement at all.
None of this is unique to wrestling. WWE itself signed a 10-year deal with Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority back in 2018 reportedly worth around $100 million a year, and this year TKO — the company WWE became part of after merging with UFC — went a step further, joining Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund in a brand-new boxing league, Zuffa Boxing, aiming for its first event in 2026. Las Vegas ran the same play for Formula 1: Clark County was asked for roughly $40 million toward circuit infrastructure, on top of separate public spending on the safety barriers and enclosures built onto Strip pedestrian bridges so people could watch the race without falling off one. Nobody in Clark County was accusing F1 of running a struggling business; the race is profitable, and the public money got asked for anyway. It’s the same instinct that built Vegas into an F1 host city: spectacle reads as a good investment right up until somebody has to itemize what it cost.
Perth said yes before WWE had to prove anything. No track record of Wrestlepalooza specifically drawing outside the United States, no guarantee the second show matches the first one creatively or financially. That’s the actual skill on display here. Every market that signs a deal like this becomes leverage for the next one, and Perth’s yes makes it easier for WWE to walk into some other capital city, some other tourism board, and point at RAC Arena as proof the model works. The card WWE didn’t plan for SummerSlam is proof enough that WWE’s domestic calendar is already stuffed. Perth is where the overflow goes, and Western Australia is footing the bill to host it.
Western Australia volunteered for this. Nobody tricked the state into anything, and WWE isn’t required to be villainous about a deal a government offered up on its own initiative. It only has to be as opportunistic as every promoter who’s ever taken a check from a government chasing relevance, and it is.
WWE’s own announcement lays out the calendar without laying out the cost.
https://twitter.com/WWE/status/2093098526301417527
Combo tickets for all three Perth shows go on sale September 10 at 10 a.m. local time, and the people buying them will know exactly what they’re paying before Tourism Western Australia ever discloses what it paid. Somewhere in that office there’s a number that isn’t going up for sale at all. For the rest of WWE’s 2026 news, at least the company tells you what it’s charging.
