In June 2016, World Wrestling Entertainment, the sports-meets-soap-opera company best known for creating American icons like Hulk Hogan, The Rock and John Cena, announced that it had signed its first Chinese recruit — Bin Wang, a 23-year-old from Anhui, China. A little more than a year later, WWE signed Shadia Bseiso, a 31-year-old television presenter from Amman, Jordan. She was the WWE’s first Arab woman signee. A few months later, the WWE added Kavita Devi, its first Indian woman, and Nasser Alruwayeh, its first Kuwaiti man.

All had followed different paths into pro wrestling, but all will begin their WWE careers in the same place: Orlando. They are among 93 recruits — “superstars- in-training,” the company calls them — who will seek to master wrestling’s physical and theatrical demands at the WWE Performance Center, a 26,000- sq-.ft. complex east of downtown where aspiring wrestlers learn how to safely take “bumps,” perform pile drivers and develop their wrestling personas.

The Performance Center has emerged as a kind of regional headquarters for the WWE — and a vital tool in shaping the future of an $800-million-a-year enterprise that’s become one of the most valuable properties in sports. WWE’s television shows reach more than 11 mil-lion viewers in the U.S. each week. Its live events draw more than 1.8 million people to arenas across North America. And its YouTube channel has generated 20 billion lifetime views.

The problem facing the WWE, which began in the early 1950s as Capitol Wrestling, is that it has already captured the entire segment of male Americans who are likely to become fans. To continue growing, the company is trying to develop a generation of international performers who can one day anchor local programming overseas — shows like WWE Sunday Dhamaal, which launched last year in India, and WWE Wal3ooha, which premiered last year in the Middle East.

WWE also is expanding its women’s division with wrestlers who are athletically gifted and keep the focus on the wrestling rather than just sex appeal. The company last year staged its first “Mae Young Classic,” an all-female tournament that the WWE said drew comparable viewership to similar men’s tournaments. That’s a dramatic shift for a company that once featured a storyline in which Chairman and CEO Vince Mc- Mahon forced the company’s top female performer to get on her knees in the ring and bark like a dog.

WWE appears to have lots of room to grow. Nearly $600 million of the company’s $800 million in sales last year — 75 cents of every dollar — came from North America, according to the company’s regulatory filings. Just 8% came from the Asia Pacific region, 6% from mainland Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and less than 2% from Latin America.

International recruiting has become such a priority that nearly half of the 93 aspiring wrestlers training at the Performance Center are from overseas — up from less than 30% three years ago. Women now comprise nearly one-third of the training center roster, up from less than a fifth a few years ago.

The company hopes a more diverse roster of performers will attract new fans.

“It’s like what Yao Ming did for the NBA in China,” says Paul Levesque, WWE’s executive vice president for talent, live events and creative, who once wrestled under the name Triple H. “People that would never have necessarily turned on basketball, it made them turn it on because they heard about this local guy. And then they fell in love with the NBA.”

Big Business
World Wrestling Entertainment earned a record $801 million in revenue in 2017. Here’s how it makes its money:
Revenue Source	Percent	Millions
Television	34%	$270.2
WWE Network subscriptions	23	183.7
Live events	19	151.7
Consumer products licensing	7	52.1
Online sales	5	37.8
Digital media	4	34.5
Venue merchandise	3	23.8
WWE Studios	2	18.6
Pay-per-view revenues	2	14.2
Home entertainment	1	8.6
Source: Forbes

Coconut shows

The WWE Performance Center is in a small commerce park on the eastern outskirts of Orlando, sharing a building with a company that makes plumbing supplies. The company spent nearly $4 million remodeling a warehouse along the lines of training facilities used by NFL teams; the New York Giants’ Quest Diagnostics Training Center in New Jersey was a specific inspiration. The center has a staff of more than 20, including 11 coaches and a five-member medical team. WWE sends even its established stars to the center for rehab when they suffer injuries, much as Major League Baseball teams send injured players to their spring training facilities to recuperate.

The centerpiece of the complex is a cavernous room with seven 20x20 rings, one with a soft canvas — “a giant pillow bed,” as head coach Matt Bloom calls it — where recruits learn dangerous maneuvers. The center ring in the room is at the bottom of an entrance ramp built to the precise dimensions of the ramp used on “Raw,” the Monday night show that is WWE’s flagship program. A pair of overhead cameras pipe live feeds into the offices of McMahon and Levesque.

Next door is a sprawling weight room run by a strength and conditioning coach that the WWE hired from the NFL’s Houston Texans. There is also a full medical room and an assortment of recording studios and editing bays where wrestlers can work on acting, character development and improvisation. A performersonly lounge and locker rooms are up-stairs, plus a small “mirror room” with a microphone and a camera where recruits can hone their TV personas in private.

WWE rookies don’t make a lucrative living, at least at first. The WWE says pay begins at $45,000 a year, although established performers brought in from independent circuits can command larger salaries. It’s a full-time job. Trainees begin each day at 9 a.m. with two or three hours of in-ring lessons. That’s followed by a couple of hours of open gym — which most spend in the ring — and then a few hours of weights and conditioning. They take promo classes on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and then spend the weekends traveling to small practice shows around Florida; the company informally refers to them as “coconut shows.”

The best performers at the center also get to star in WWE’s NXT division, which has bloomed rapidly into an established promotion in its own right. In addition to taping the weekly television show at Full Sail University, the NXT performers also tour the world.

As NXT has grown, WWE has continued to expand its Orlando footprint. The company’s spending on talent-related expenses, which includes the performance center, has jumped 41% over the past three years, from $17.8 million to $25.1 million. And it now leases nearly 50,000 square feet of space in Orlando, nearly double the square footage it had when it first opened the performance center. The extra space has been used primarily for more production facilities.

The number of performers that the WWE has under contract — from established superstars on multi-year guaranteed deals to the superstars-in-training — has climbed from 135 to 200 over the past three years, a 48% increase.

“It’s a great training ground for them. It brings in a lot of talent and allows them to program more hours,” says Laura Martin, an equities research analyst who covers media and entertainment for Needham & Co. “It’s a big expense, but I think it makes your product better.”

The dynamic inside the center has evolved as WWE has begun to prioritize diversity in its recruiting. The lobby of the building at times more resembles the terminal at an international airport than a wrestling training ground.

On a recent visit, a training center employee could be found helping Alruwayeh, the Kuwaiti recruit, arrange an overseas trip. “Every time you come back, bring your passport to me,” she told him. “Let me know the day you’re back so I can start your English classes back up.”

He was soon followed by a Chinese recruit named Yifeng Han, who had been summoned to the lobby after getting a ticket for driving with an expired license. “His driver’s license is expired. If he gets pulled over, he could go to jail,” the employee told his translator. “He needs to go (to the DMV) with his passport, he needs to go with his I-94, he needs to go with his current driver’s license and he needs to go with two documents that show his current address.”

“Cultural awareness is very important,” says Bloom, the head coach. Bloom, 45, is a 6-foot-7 former offensive lineman with a shaved head, close-shorn beard and three silver studs below his lower lip who once wrestled as Prince Albert and A-Train. “It’s a melting pot right now.”

Sara Amato, who spent years wrestling on independent circuits as Sara Del Rey, joined the WWE in September 2012 as its first woman coach. The company had only eight female recruits at the time; today it has 25. Amato, who has been promoted to second-in-command at the training center, has since been joined by two more female trainers. “Women want to see women empowered,” Amato says.

Expect the flow of new talent into Orlando to continue. Levesque, the WWE executive in charge of talent, live events and creative, says the company could eventually expand the central Florida facility and add performance centers elsewhere around the world.

“The long-term goal,” Levesque says, “is to continue to grow this.”

Wrestling’s Second Home

Orlando’s charm offensive won over WWE executives.

The evolution of Central Florida into a hub for World Wrestling Entertainment over the past decade began with a phone call.

In January 2006, Bob Collins, then the WWE executive in charge of marketing the company’s live events, called Allen Johnson, a city of Orlando employee who ran the former Amway Arena and the Florida Citrus Bowl.

After the two began discussing holding the WrestleMania event in Orlando, Johnson quickly brought in John Saboor, then CEO of the Central Florida Sports Commission, an agency charged with luring sporting events to the region.

Saboor saw in WrestleMania a twofold opportunity. It was, foremost, a chance to host a major event; Wrestle- Mania is one of the most valuable sporting events in the world, according to Forbes, similar in scope to an NCAA Final Four or a Daytona 500. Saboor also saw WrestleMania as a way to add momentum to a lobbying campaign by Orlando’s business community to persuade city and county leaders to spend $1.1 billion on a new arena, renovating the Citrus Bowl and building a performing arts center.

Saboor persuaded city leaders to treat WrestleMania as an economicdevelopment project. Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, who grew up going to Championship Wrestling from Florida events in Osceola County, flew to Stamford, Conn., to personally deliver the city’s pitch to WWE Chairman and CEO Vince McMahon and a dozen other company executives.

“The message was simple: Orlando wants you more than any other community and was willing to assign its political capital and its Good Housekeeping seal to securing the event,” Saboor says.

The charm offensive worked: WrestleMania 24 in 2008 set a gate record at the Citrus Bowl with nearly $6 million in ticket sales. Meanwhile, WWE was impressed with Saboor, who encouraged WWE to begin thinking of its major events as economicdevelopment projects for which cities should compete. A few months later, the company hired Saboor.

Saboor, now WWE’s executive vice president of special events, remained in Orlando, where he helped negotiate a deal to tape a TV show for NXT, WWE’s minor league, at Full Sail University. Full Sail got an established brand to help lend its programs credibility and an on-campus chance for students to gain real-world experience; WWE got access to state-of-the-art production space and a new talent pipeline.

With the Full Sail-NXT deal in place, Central Florida didn’t even need to offer incentives when WWE decided to build its nearly $4-million Performance Center. NXT talent already had to be in Orlando regularly for Full Sail tapings. And Orlando offered an airport with plenty of low-priced flights to markets all over the world and an affordable cost of living for recruits whose pay begins around $45,000 a year.

Last year, WrestleMania returned to Orlando. WWE’s WrestleMania 33 drew a record crowd of 75,245 in April to the revamped CItrus Bowl, now called Camping World Stadium.

This time, however, Orlando had to compete against other cities for the event — and the WWE wound up with a much more favorable deal. In 2008, the city charged WWE a rental fee of $50,000 and got a 25% cut of most souvenir sales. In 2017, the city paid WWE a $400,000 fee and received a much smaller share of the souvenirs.

Central Florida leaders are hoping to land even more WWE business over time. Dyer has pitched the McMahon family on making Orlando part of a recurring rotation for WrestleMania, and Gov. Rick Scott has approached the company about moving its headquarters to the state.

“The more that we’re doing in Orlando, the more exciting it becomes,” Saboor says. “In many respects, Orlando has become WWE’s regional headquarters."

WWE’s Next Generation

The prospect who seems to most excite WWE executives is Shadia Bseiso, who had been working as a TV presenter, live-event host and voice-over artist for a media company in Dubai when the WWE discovered her. Her signing, as the first Arab woman in WWE history, drew headlines around the world.

Bseiso, who grew up in a home with a single television channel, wasn’t a wrestling fan as a kid. But she says she’s always been passionate about sports. She started learning jujitsu four years ago and is already a three-stripe blue belt who competes internationally.

She and the WWE stumbled into each other. She auditioned for a job as a host on the company’s new Middle Eastern show, Wal3ooha, and told the producers about her background in jujitsu. Instead of hiring her as a host, the company gave her a spot in an April 2017 wrestling tryout in Dubai. The tryout hadn’t even ended when WWE officials told Bseiso that they wanted to hire her.

Bseiso arrived in Orlando in January to learn ring awareness and body control and how to safely perform basic moves like headlocks. She has traveled to NXT events but has not yet appeared in one. But WWE executives think they have a star on their hands.

“She lit the internet on fire just signing with us,” says Paul Levesque, WWE’s executive vice president for talent, live events and creative.

 

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