Viewership for WWE Crown Jewel appears to be well below most of WWE’s premium live events this year, and it may have even been the lowest of the year.
Speaking on Thursday’s Wrestling Observer Radio, Dave Meltzer estimated that Saturday’s show in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, drew between 1.2 million and 1.3 million views. According to Meltzer, most of this year’s PLEs have been closer to 2 million.
However, Meltzer made it clear that the number is an estimate based on data from multiple sources.
“I don’t have the number, but I have enough numbers of things in different places to where you can kind of feel it’s about 1.2, maybe 1.3 million views,” Meltzer said.
Netflix, which airs WWE’s PLEs outside of the U.S., has released official numbers for the first half of the year, and only Night of Champions (1 million views) came in under that range. The show was held on June 27, and the report only counted its first four days. If the estimate is right, Crown Jewel will come in under both May’s Backlash and the 2025 Crown Jewel in Perth, Australia, which each drew 1.4 million.
Meltzer pointed out that the numbers were down in every market, as were Google searches. During Sunday’s Wrestling Observer Daily Update, he noted that Crown Jewel had around 57,000 Google searches, with most PLEs at around 200,000.
Meltzer believes the problem is that fans aren’t very interested in the Crown Jewel Championships.
“The idea of these Crown Jewel championships, now that we’ve done it for a couple years and it means nothing, people don’t go out of their way to see it,” he said. “That’s the reality of it. It wasn’t a draw.”
The Crown Jewel Championships debuted in 2024, when WWE announced that Crown Jewel was its most-watched Saudi Arabia event ever, with viewership up 28 percent from 2023.