Meltzer’s financial analysis
By Scott Keith on 19 January 2025
Hey Scott,
A discussion topic for the blog…
In response to comments that AEW is artificially profitable because of their TV deals, Meltzer has spent a lot of the weekend arguing with people on Twitter about how pretty much every sporting organization is currently profitable because of their billion dollar TV deals, and that many others would be in worse situations without a TV deal than AEW is in. In order to prove this, he took companies' current financials and removed the TV deal to show what sort of loss they would be operating at.
Surely anyone with even minimal business experience would know that this is a ridiculous and useless support to this argument. You cannot take a business model built around one revenue stream (in this case, television deals) and then remove any money made from that revenue stream, while also not including a replacement for that revenue stream. Surely a more sensible analysis would be to view how diversified a company's revenue stream is, how many corporate partnerships the company has and what the overall trajectory of the company (are they growing in popularity or are they cold) is. This would give a more honest analysis of a company's strength without a TV deal.
I'm by no means inherently anti Meltzer (I appreciate his historic contribution to professional wrestling), but he's trying to argue that the NBA losing TV rights would be more catastrophic than AEW losing their television deal, when an honest business analysis would recognize that the NBA would have a far easier time finding a new lucrative partnership. When it comes to his business analysis, it just seems like he looks at things in such rigid, black-and-white matters and lacks any deep, critical thinking. I was taken aback by how obtuse he was to recognize his scenario was weak.
1. Dave needs to get off Twitter.
2. Are we STILL trying to find ways to invalidate AEW and move the goal posts even after they got the giant TV deal? Really?