Wrestling legend Jeff Jarrett recently said that TKO Group Holdings is making a fundamental mistake by treating WWE's audience the same as UFC's and argued that corporate pricing strategy is the root cause of the ticket sales struggles WWE has been experiencing.
Speaking on his My World with Jeff Jarrett podcast alongside host Conrad Thompson, the WWE Hall of Famer laid out a pointed critique of the parent company's approach to live event pricing.
They've gotten carried away with ticket prices because of what they can charge for UFC," Jarrett said. "TKO's going, 'Look what we can charge for UFC.' But it's just a different audience and a different mentality.
Jarrett pointed to a recent WrestleMania discount weekend as the clearest sign that prices have been set too high. WWE offered 25% off tickets and still couldn't move inventory, a data point he called hard to ignore.
They did that 25% off weekend and they didn't even move tickets," he said. "Even at 25% off, those are high tickets.
Meltzer Is Nailing It
In a notable moment, Jarrett offered explicit praise for Dave Meltzer — acknowledging that he doesn't always agree with the Wrestling Observer founder but believes he's correct on this issue.
In my mind, Meltzer's nailing this," Jarrett said. "The UFC can command these crazy ticket prices, but that's not WWE's audience.
His argument centers on a demographic gap between the two properties. UFC, he said, skews heavily male with a higher-income fanbase — the kind of audience that supports premium pricing. WWE's audience is structurally different: broader, more family-oriented, and multi-generational.
UFC is going to skew to an audience that is more male and would carry a higher CPM — it's probably better socioeconomically stronger demographics," Jarrett said. "I don't think they can treat every show like UFC. Every UFC carries a premium and there are super shows. WWE ticket sales on average are never going to rival UFC.
Jarrett was careful to note his support for TKO consolidating backend operations — legal, accounting, and infrastructure efficiencies make sense. His critique is specifically about applying a unified pricing philosophy to two fundamentally different products.
I love the idea of running the backend the same," he said. "You market differently, you produce differently. It is conceptually a different business.
This isn't the first time WWE's ticket pricing strategy has drawn criticism from within the industry. Randy Orton has also called out WrestleMania ticket prices as out of step with the traditional WWE fanbase, and WWE surpassed UFC in annual revenue for the first time in 2025 — but Jarrett's point is that strong revenue numbers don't tell the full story of a broken pricing model at the event level.
