WWE owned a piece of the XFL, after all

The resurrection of the XFL was sold as an endeavor bought exclusively by Vince McMahon, with no involvement from his publicly-traded wrestling corporation, WWE. The wreckage of XFL 2.0 says otherwise.

Via multiple reports, WWE owned 23.5 percent of the Class B stock in the XFL, while McMahon owned the other 76.5 percent. McMahon also owned 100 percent of the Class A stock in the XFL. (Typically, Class A stock has greater voting rights than Class B stock.)

When McMahon conducted a press conference unveiling the project in 2018, he said that “there will be no crossover whatsoever” with WWE, and he specifically said that this doesn’t relate to funding.

“I wanted to do this since the day we stopped the other one,” McMahon told ESPN at the time. “A chance to do it with no partners, strictly funded by me, which would allow me to look in the mirror and say, ‘You were the one who screwed this up,’ or ‘You made this thing a success.'”

Whether the actual state of affairs creates any problems for WWE is a separate issue, but if the WWE investment was significant and if it was not disclosed in the financial information of a publicly-traded company, that could be a problem — especially if WWE ended up throwing a large chunk of change away.

WWE owned a piece of the XFL, after alloriginally appeared on Pro Football Talk.