Florida fans, get ready to start practicing your countdowns from 10.
PW Insider Elite (subscription required) is the latest to chime in with word that WWE Royal Rumble 2024 could be headed your way — specifically to Tropicana Field, home of the MLB Tampa Bay Rays. Fightful Select (subscription also required) agrees, saying its spoken to people who feel “Tampa has been a front runner for quite some time.”
The Royal Rumble was held at Tropicana Field just three years ago, but that was out of necessity instead of design. Smack dab in the middle of WWE’s COVID-19 pandemic phase, all WWE programming was originating from that venue at the time, when it was called the WWE ThunderDome and no fans were on hand.
Hosting the show next year would obviously be a much different proposition, and part of WWE’s strategy of making Royal Rumble a larger stadium show that first began in 2019. Prior to the pandemic event, the Tampa-St. Pete area had been the locale for the Royal Rumble just once, in 1995 at the USF Sun Dome.
Florida in general has hosted the Royal Rumble in four other years: 1990 in Orlando, 1991 and 2006 in Miami, and 2016 in Orlando.
The announcement of the venue for the 2023 Royal Rumble, which took place in San Antonio, was made on Sept. 7, 2022. That suggests there are about six weeks before WWE reveals the site for 2024, which isn’t that long for people in the Tampa area to keep their fingers crossed.