Kevin Nash has laid out exactly how he believes WWE royalty statements obscure the money the company earns off a wrestler’s likeness, arguing that talent historically saw only a fraction of the revenue tied to their intellectual property.
Speaking on his Kliq This podcast, the WWE Hall of Famer said he is not the only veteran who has noticed the gap.
The core of Nash’s complaint is transparency. He says the paperwork wrestlers once received was detailed enough to trace, but the modern version tells them almost nothing about what WWE actually makes from their name and image.
The actual breakdown that you receive is so… like in the old days, the breakdown was, I was talking to Lita, Amy, about this, we were talking about it. It was like when you used to get your royalty statement, it was literally 50 pages thick. Now it’s like three,” Nash said.
It says like ‘nWo intellectual property’ and it has your percentage and what you make.
From there, Nash walked through the math. Using himself as an example and rounding the numbers, he said his cut works out to roughly 20 percent, which would leave WWE with several times what he takes home on the same items.
And then if you take that and say, in my example, I’ll round it up to make the math easier, I get 20%. Which means that the total revenue would be another four times what I get. So let’s say if I got $10,000 for an item… They would have made 50, right?
Nash argued that once you apply that ratio across a full catalog of merchandise, the totals become hard to stomach. His frustration, though, is aimed less at the split itself than at the impossibility of verifying it.
And when you do it on a lot of items, you’re like, ‘F**k if I would give both of my kidneys if that’s all they’re making.’ It’s the same as when you start getting backends on movies or books,” he said.
You just got to kind of roll with it… What are you going to do? Are you going to order forensic accounting?
His comments fit a broader pattern. Nash has long pushed for wrestlers to earn a bigger share of the revenue they generate, and he has previously taken aim at WWE and TKO management over how the promotion handles its talent.
These remarks are Nash’s own allegations, drawn from his experience, and there is no public WWE documentation confirming or disputing his figures on statement length, percentage splits, or nWo royalty ratios.
