Ari Emanuel went on Fox News this week to answer whether WWE Crown Jewel is still happening in Riyadh on Saturday, November 7. He sounded like a man checking a weather app on a sunny morning. “Right now, everything is still set,” the TKO CEO said, per Fightful’s transcription. He pointed to the UFC card in Abu Dhabi this weekend and an art fair in mid-November, then added, “So far, so good. Nothing has been canceled.”
So far, so good. Hours before that interview made the rounds, Turki Alalshikh was on X sharing a coalition statement that air defenses had intercepted and destroyed a ballistic missile the Houthi militia fired at Riyadh. In another post he reshared a Civil Defense alert announcing “The danger has passed in Riyadh City” and asking residents to “avoid gathering and filming.” His own caption said the city was protected by God.
Here’s my take. TKO should move Crown Jewel now, and the people behind Canelo vs. Mbili should do the same. Waiting until next week is too late.
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“Daily monitoring” is a weather report
Emanuel’s second answer is the one I keep coming back to. Asked whether there was a scenario where the show gets canceled, he said, “Yeah, we have a whole team working on this and kind of when if that doesn’t happen, where we can move it. It’s a daily monitoring.”
I’ll give him credit for being straight about it. But that answer also tells you the backup plan already exists, sitting in a drawer, and the company is choosing to leave it there. Waiting is a decision too. Every day the show stays in Riyadh, wrestlers, production crews and traveling fans keep booking flights into a country where the U.S. Embassy is warning Americans to take extreme caution at airports, according to Fightful. Earlier in the week the State Department told Americans across the Middle East to “exercise heightened vigilance.”
The airport warning carries extra weight. In his Yahoo Sports mailbag Thursday, Ben Fowlkes wrote that another strike on another Saudi airport had killed more people the night before. He also wrote that the United States was pulling diplomats, their families and non-emergency personnel out of the kingdom while he was typing. When a government evacuates people whose entire job is to be in that country, a touring wrestling production can probably afford to stay home.
A crowd is exactly what they told people to avoid
Go back to that Civil Defense alert. Avoid gathering. A sold-out arena is thousands of people gathered in one room, and that full building is the whole point of a Crown Jewel or a Canelo fight. You can’t run that show in a city where emergency services are telling residents to stay away from crowds unless you’re comfortable asking everyone to ignore them.
Fowlkes laid out what happens next if something goes wrong. Everyone outside combat sports would look back and call the problem obvious, and the executives would have to explain why they sent people into what he described as essentially an active military conflict zone. He called going there for an event that could run just as easily in Las Vegas or New York “absolutely ridiculous.” Karim Zidan titled his Sports Politika column “Fight Night in an Active War Zone,” which is about as plain as a headline gets.
Why the money makes this sticky
None of this is a mystery. Fowlkes pointed out that TKO pitched Zuffa Boxing to investors as a venture funded by Saudi money instead of TKO’s own. When the partner paying the bills is also the host country, moving a show means a phone call nobody at TKO wants to make. I understand the business problem. It’s still a smaller problem than a ballistic missile over the host city.
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Fowlkes went a step further and suggested that if things change in Saudi Arabia, TKO could pull the plug on boxing entirely and lean on its MMA and wrestling businesses, which already make plenty of money. That’s a long-term question. Crown Jewel is a 15-day question.
Abu Dhabi comes first
Before any of that, there’s the UFC card in Abu Dhabi this weekend, the same card Emanuel cited as proof that things are fine. A widely shared r/MMA post Friday morning carried a headline saying the U.S. had ordered non-essential diplomats and families out of Saudi Arabia and several Gulf countries, including the UAE, in anticipation of war on Iran. I can’t confirm the full scope of that order from the post alone, and I’d be happy to be wrong about it. But if the UAE is on that list, the UFC is flying fighters, cornermen and officials into a country the U.S. is emptying of embassy families. The reassurance we’re getting in return is that nothing has been canceled yet.
I live for prelim scraps and debut nerves, and I want every fighter on that card to get their walkout. I’d also like them to get home through an airport nobody has been warned about.
Emanuel has the team and the backup venues. He said so on national television. Crown Jewel is scheduled for Saturday, November 7, which leaves TKO 15 days to use the plan it already has.
