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Don Feria/Associated Press

WWE Superstars’ salaries are hush-hush.

In the NBA, NFL, boxing and most other professional sports, earnings are openly discussed and as easily accessible as a player’s stat sheet. But the opposite is true in WWE. There is no fawning courtship of free agents. There is no public, collective bargaining. Instead, every wrestler works as an independent contractor.

This system is a holdover from the old territory days of pro wrestling when wrestlers would move around the country as special attractions and deal with local promoters. WWE Chairman Vince McMahon (and his father, Vince McMahon Sr.) used “handshake” agreements to do business.

In an interview with James Tehrani, WWE legend George “The Animal” Steele claimed that for 30 years he wrestled for WWE without a contract. In 2011, during a shareholder’s meeting, Vince McMahon revealed he and The Rock still had an ongoing handshake agreement "based on increased value." Sometimes, with the older wrestlers, the old way of doing business worked best, though it added another level of impenetrability to an already Byzantine process.

But what are WWE deals like today?

This past March, Forbes published a list of the highest-paid WWE wrestlers for 2016 based on “public filings, booking contracts and pay documents as well as interviews with industry insiders.”

It’s fun to compare this list to last year’s to see who's new (AJ Styles), who's moved down (John Cena) and who’s moved up (Brock Lesnar). Further, based on the data, one can make some educated extrapolations about where WWE’s priorities presently lay.

Who, exactly, makes what? And for how many appearances? And for how much in-ring work?

Shane McMahon has a point: Money talks. This is what it’s saying.