As noted here a few weeks ago, WWE’s female roster will not be a part of Friday’s Greatest Royal Rumble pay-per-view.

The Saudi Arabian government is responsible for filling the 62,000-seat stadium so, essentially, it’s a sold show for WWE. The crowd capacity will likely be around 52,000 when the stage is set up. The Saudi Arabian government is not concerned about breaking even on ticket sales so that is why tickets are so cheap at 10 or 20 Saudi Riyal ($2.67 and $5.35 USD + free drinks). It’s basically a propaganda event for them. Most of the expensive seats have been reserved for the Saudi General Sports Authority and their celebrity friends.

Basically, the only way to get a ticket in most of the stadium is if you have a family with a woman in it. The idea is to portray to the world that they’ve progressed with women’s rights in the country. Single men are allowed to attend but they there are only 10,000 seats allocated for them and they are only allowed to sit in the bad seats. The belief is that the show won’t come across well because the most vocal fans will be sitting far away.

The word in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia is that the local promotion has been lackluster and unless you are a hardcore WWE fan, then you probably wouldn’t know that a show is taking place on Friday. It will be interesting to see how many fans they can get to attend because The Saudi General Sports Authority wasn’t able to fill the stadium for high-level soccer matches, their most popular sport.

All of the single male tickets sold out in about an hour so and, as you can imagine, there are some angry hardcore fans that will not be able to attend. Many of them have been protesting but there could be some accommodations made because so much of the stadium has not been sold yet. One other thing about the tickets is that anyone who bought a ticket is not allowed to pick a seat. Anyone who bought a ticket will know what section they will be in but the government will assign seating when fans get there.

News from The Wrestling Observer website was used in this post. For more on this story please visit WrestlingObserver.com. Dave Meltzer and Bryan Alvarez’ WrestlingObserver.com is the leading source for professional wrestling news. Click here for subscription information. Members get exclusive access to insider news from Dave Meltzer and Bryan Alvarez, daily audio shows, breaking news audio, the Wrestling Observer newsletter, newsletter archives, thousands of hours of archived radio shows, and much more.











