WWE Refusing To Advertise Brock Lesnar For Upcoming ‘RAW’ Shows Until He Signs A New Contract
There are a lot of people who are baffled that WWE is having Brock Lesnar appear on RAW tomorrow night unadvertised. Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer speculates that WWE is refusing to advertise Lesnar because they’re mad that he hasn’t signed a contract extension with the company.
WWE’s original plan was to completely build everything around Lesnar from the Royal Rumble until WrestleMania 31, where he’d drop the WWE championship to Roman Reigns. Now, Lesnar could drop the WWE title as early as the Royal Rumble against John Cena.
Fans who are familiar with Brock Lesnar know that he doesn’t really care about anything other than money. So WWE refusing to advertise Lesnar on RAW until he signs a new contract likely doesn’t matter all that much to Lesnar, as WWE is paying him nearly $1 million per match no matter what. Unless WWE is willing to sustain that number or increase it, Lesnar is going to leave and rejoin the UFC when his WWE contract expires in the spring.
WWE, UFC, and Bellator are all going to be trying to sign Lesnar when he becomes a free agent. The belief within WWE is that Lesnar is gearing up for a return to mixed martial arts, hence Lesnar’s obvious weight loss. Also, it’s unlikely that WWE will re-sign Lesnar, as Vince McMahon think’s the contract he signed Lesnar to back in 2012 is far too expensive.
Brock Lesnar was the biggest pay-per-view draw in the history of the UFC, and when WWE brought him back the night after WrestleMania 28, they hoped he would bring his pay-per-view numbers with him. That didn’t exactly happen, and now that WWE has killed off their own pay-per-view business by putting all of their PPVs on the WWE Network, they’ll likely want to reduce Lesnar’s salary, which is something that “The Beast” probably won’t be happy about.
Financially, the best place for Lesnar to be in 2015 will be the UFC. There’s no doubt that Brock Lesnar’s return fight would be a big-money ticket, and should he win that fight, all of Lesnar’s fights will likely go on to do the business that his previous fights did. However, many mixed martial arts experts believe that Lesnar cannot compete at the top level of the UFC’s heavyweight division, and will likely retire soon after his UFC return.
The belief is that Lesnar will leave WWE in the spring, return to the UFC, and after he feels like his UFC career is over, he’ll return to WWE for one more run before retiring for good.
[Image via WWE]
