WWE’s SummerSlam event, long considered the second most important pay-per-view in the company’s year behind only WrestleMania, will take place in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 2019. This marks the first time the event will be held outside of Brooklyn since 2014. Before that, SummerSlam took place in Los Angeles’ Staples Center from 2009-2014.
A statement from WWE executive vice president of special events John Saboor was released via ET Canada, saying:
“We are thrilled to bring WWE’s biggest event of the summer back to Toronto. We look forward to working with our partners at Tourism Toronto and Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment to build a blueprint that welcomes our global fan base to the great city of Toronto.”
This is an interesting development for a couple reasons: One, pay-per-view events in Canada are vanishingly rare these days, despite cities like Toronto being full of rabid WWE fans. Secondly, with SummerSlam being held in Brooklyn’s Barclay Center for the past four years, NXT has claimed stake to the night before for NXT TakeOver Brooklyn, an event that has in many ways become NXT’s WrestleMania. Of course the pre-SummerSlam TakeOver will still exist, but it seems that the lineage of TakeOver Brooklyn is now dead.
This will be just the second SummerSlam event ever held in Canada, following up 2004’s installment, which was also held in Toronto.
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