WWE Sues Texas Attorney General To Prevent Release Of Royal Rumble 2023 Agreement

WWE has filed a lawsuit against Texas’ attorney general seeking to prevent their “proprietary information” around bidding for the 2023 Royal Rumble from being released. Wrestlenomics reports that the company filed suit on February 16th in relation to their agreement with the City of San Antonio to bring the 2023 Rumble there.

The lawsuit was filed after Wrestlenomics and Intelligence Options, LLC requested records from the city after the Rumble in order to report on ticket sales for the event as well as what the city provided to WWE in exchange for bringing the PPV to the Alamodome. WWE is arguing that the agreement is a trade secret that has proprietary information, claiming that it fits within an exemption in Texas’s public information law. City officials were granted an exemption from the AG’s office allowing them to withhold the information, but the Attorney General reversed course on January 17th, 2024. Assistant Attorney General Michelle Garza stated in the revised decision that “WWE has failed to provide specific factual evidence demonstrating the information at issue is confidential under” Texas’s public information law.

WWE has a practice of receiving site fees from government entities for major events; for example, WWE received over $1.5 million in subsidies from Puerto Rico’s government to host Backlash and Smackdown in the territory in May of 2023. TKO’s Mark Shapiro also noted in December that the company was receiving $16 million for events in Australia, which likely includes Elimination Chamber that took place in Perth.

The report notes that the records are eligible for a records request due to the fact that the Alamodome is owned and operated by the San Antonio’s city government. Similarly, contract between the city and WWE is a public record because for the same reason.

WWE is arguing that the contract should be exempt from public records requests because it contains trade secrets, which are described in the public information laws as (with some conditions) “all forms and types of information, including business, scientific, technical, economic, or engineering information, and any formula, design, prototype, pattern, plan, compilation, program device, program, code, device, method, technique, process, procedure, financial data, or list of actual or potential customers or suppliers, whether tangible or intangible and whether or however stored, compiled, or memorialized physically, electronically, graphically, photographically”.

WWE is seeking a judgment and injunction to prevent the bidding contract’s release now or in the future. WWE Senior Vice President of Communications Chris Legentil said in the suit:

“If this information was made publicly available and Brandon Thurston was permitted to publicize our financial information and negotiated terms on Wrestlenomics, WWE would lose our bargaining power in negotiating all of our live events and much of the value of a bidding process for venues.”