At the Wrestling Classics Message Board, Matt Farmer, who’s a well-known pro wrestling historian and former indie wrestler known to be very well connected in the industry, has posted the exact attendance for WrestleMania 32. Reports from Dave Meltzer and Brian Alvarez of WrestlingObserver.com pegged the number as somewhere between 93,000 and 94,000, which made sense because WWE usually exaggerates by about 8,000 people and they announced 101,763.
According to Farmer, the actual number is 93,730. That includes several thousand standing room tickets to the “Dallas Cowboys Party Plaza,” which is in the AT&T Stadium facility but not the main stadium bowl. It’s not unlike counting the old closed circuit crowds at the Felt Forum (now The Theater) as part of the attendance for Madison Square Garden cards where the forum was opened up due to overflow. They’re in the same building, but they’re not necessarily the same venue, though the Party Plaza is always counted in AT&T Stadium numbers.
Farmer also noted that “As of last week there was just over 86,000 tickets sold.”
This is the new undisputed WWE record, and is the verified professional wrestling record outside of the two shows at Mayday Stadium in Pyongyang, North Korea in 1995. Those shows are extreme outliers, being that they took place in a dictatorship, nobody there had ever seen pro wrestling before, and, for lack of a better term, those in attendance felt it was their civic duty to attend. The previous announced record was, of course, WrestleMania III at the Pontiac Silverdome in 1987, which WWE has always insisted publicly was 93,173. According to both Meltzer and PWTorch’s Wade Keller, Zane Brushoff, the local promoter (who’s since passed away), provided documentation to them showing the number was about 78,500. Meltzer was later given access to internal WWE records that showed the same number.
The actual record for WWE was 78,927 for SummerSlam 92 at Wembley Stadium, which was announced as “just” (as in relative to WrestleMania III) 80,355. Presumably the reason for that was wanting WrestleMania III to be the “official” record until they could beat it by a wide margin. Since then, stadium WrestleManias usually topped off a few thousand short of the record. There have been a number of stadium shows in places like India, Pakistan, and Greece that are believed to have drawn anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 fans, but it’s not at all clear how verifiable those figures are. Particularly, King Kong Czaja is believed to have drawn a number of six figure crowds in the 1940s.
But until we get more verification of those numbers, WrestleMania 32 at AT&T Stadium is the biggest crowd that doesn’t involve loyalty to a dictator.
