FINAL COUNT: AEW All In [Wembley Stadium, London]

AEW ALL IN
Sun, 27 Aug 2023, 17:00Sun, 27 Aug 2023
Wembley Stadium, London

Tickets Distributed => 83,131

Announced Paid Attendance: 81,035

Rather than taking the route of announcing a total number of every person possible in the building (as WWE traditionally does), AEW chose to announce a paid attendance figure of 81,035. Chris Jericho referred to it as a "shoot" number on Dynamite last week. Tony Khan later announced at the press conference that if you added in the ushers and other staff, you would get closer to 90,000. 

It's important to note that suites aren't included in my estimates. I am operating under the assumption that those people were counted as part of the paid figure. Having the suite number would bump up the distributed count but I'm not sure if I'll be able to obtain that (very difficult to get). In the screenshot below it mentions they fit 8 to 20 people in 160 suites. Take the middle of 8 and 20, which is 14 x 160 = 2,240. But I have no idea how well populated the suites were for the show. I would lean toward a lower number than that based off what I've seen from suites being occupied at other major wrestling shows in the past.

Another important point is that the number of production kills was higher than I anticipated, which explains many of the early inflated estimates we saw circulating when this seating map first became available. (It's worth noting that any seat blocked off would never have been listed for sale, but it would still appear on the map. Additionally, there were several sections that were only partially tarped, further complicating matters.)

I will provide you with some of the numbers I came up with and explain how I arrived at this final count. Then, I'll share all the photos I can that might help understand it better. I also asked Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics if he would be willing to come up with his own estimate for production kills (defined as sections blocked/tarped off).

It's important to consider another number here, which is the number of tickets held by AEW. On May 10th, I noted the following in an update: "Brandon Thurston revealed that 15,000 tickets were being held back for various reasons (sightlines, production holds, wanting to sell other seats first before releasing these, etc.)." [NOTE: In this post, I am separating holds & kills. Of course you could group them together if you wanted but based off the late map activity of tickets coming and going in specific sections like the West end of the upper decks, it's easier to classify those as holds or pulls (tickets that are pulled for various reasons like wanting to sell other seats first).]

I have estimated the number of holds to be in the 3,200 range. If you look at the upper decks that were removed late (see screenshots below) and other areas with missing seats in pictures, this estimate seems fair. On 8/22, the upper decks on the West end of the map came back in near full capacity and the available count went up to 5,207. The next morning, many of those seats disappeared again and the available count went down to 4,559 (a loss of 648 seats). On 8/26, a similar situation happened as the available count went from 4,575 down to 2,143 and it was mostly upper deck seats on the West end of the map that disappeared (a loss of 2,432). Eventually the West end upper decks were mostly gone by the day of the show (but as pictures show below, they weren't distributed/sold in full and if they were, many didn't show up). That alone brings me to 3,080 holds. I added in some other similar scenarios which brought me to 3,200 in total. I don't rule out this number could be higher.

One of the last times I saw the upper decks behind the hard cams return with every seat available (that hadn't sold).

The final available count on the day of the show that I saw was 786. Most of those were seats behind the hard cams in the 200 levels (and some scattered seats in the 100s). Here was one of the final screenshots I posted of the ticket map on X:

The formula for how I arrived at the final count is: 97,417 (every seat on the map) - 786 (final available count before the map closed) - 10,300 (estimated production kills) - 3,200 (estimated tickets held by AEW) = 83,131.

One of the big questions remaining from this is will we get another count from a source other than AEW? Brandon Thurston reached out to the London police and Wembley Stadium asking for any other numbers and to confirm the announced paid attendance. The police advised him to reach out to Wembley Stadium. Wembley said they do not issue attendance figures and that is up to the event owner/promoter. That means we won't get a turnstile count and leaves us with one other non-AEW option, Pollstar.

Pollstar does have some Wembley Stadium events that we have seen so it’s a possibility but it could take months to show up if at all.

The reason I asked for another set of eyes on the production kills was to double-check what I was seeing (and what I perceived as a high number). But, to avoid skewing his estimate, I simply provided Brandon with a set of pictures to work with, along with the full section counts, and asked him to return the section counts after subtracting what he thought was closed off. His number was just slightly higher than mine.

Here are some relevant photos of the sections tarped off with some comments:

Everything in green is tarped.

Brandon made his own version as seen above. One challenge with this map was on the actual ticket map, sections that seemed like one were actually 2 sections really close to each other as demonstrated below. 

To help identify the section names:

Other images that helped identify kills:

Thanks to @AEWTicketMap for a few of those shots.

I received a lot of photos for this one but this one is among the best and a good look at the stadium at its fullest during the show: 

from @Isaac4kings

from @IsakStromstedt.

from @RandyS_174

That's about it for now. I do wonder what the discourse would have been like if AEW announced 90K instead? Probably way worse than what I saw when the paid figure was announced. I will update this post if I've left anything off. Special thanks to all of you who sent pictures and helped identify certain things with this map along the way. It was one of the most difficult I've worked with so I can't say I'm looking forward to it next year. Big thanks to Brandon Thurston of Wrestlenomics for all of his help on this final count. Subscribe to his patreon here.